Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (76 page)

pesticides, or salts from upstream that reach urban drinking areas and agri
cultural irrigation areas downstream. Examples that I already mentioned
are the salt and agricultural chemicals from the Murray River, which fur
nishes much of Adelaide's drinking water, and the pesticides from New South Wales and Queensland cotton fields, which jeopardize the mar
ketability of downstream attempts to grow chemical-free wheat and beef.

In part because Australia itself has fewer native animal species than the
other continents, it has been especially vulnerable to exotic species from overseas becoming intentionally or accidentally established, and then depleting or exterminating populations of native animals and plants without
evolved defenses against such alien species. Notorious examples that I al
ready mentioned are rabbits, which consume about half of the pasturage
that could otherwise be consumed by sheep and cattle; foxes, which have
preyed on and exterminated many native mammal species; several thou
sand species of plant weeds, which have transformed habitats, crowded out
native plants, degraded pasture quality, and occasionally poisoned livestock;
and carp, which have damaged water quality in the Murray/Darling River.

A few other horror stories involving introduced pests deserve briefer mention. Domestic buffalo, camels, donkeys, goats, and horses that have gone feral trample, browse, and otherwise damage large areas of habitat.
Hundreds of species of insect pests have established themselves more easily
in Australia than in temperate-zone countries with cold winters. Among
them, blowflies, mites, and ticks have been especially damaging to livestock and pastures, while caterpillars, fruit flies, and many others are damaging to
crops. Cane Toads, introduced in 1935 to control two insect pests of sugarcane, failed to do that but did spread over an area of 100,000 square miles,
assisted by the fact that they can live for up to 20 years and that females annually lay 30,000 eggs. The toads are poisonous, inedible to all native Aus
tralian animals, and rate as one of the worst mistakes ever committed in the
name of pest control.

Finally, Australia's isolation by the oceans, and hence its heavy reliance
on ship transport from overseas, has resulted in many marine pests arriving
in discharged ballast water and dry ballast of ships, on ship hulls, and in
materials imported for aquaculture. Among those marine pests are comb
jellies, crabs, toxic dinoflagellates, shellfish, worms, and a Japanese starfish
that depleted the Spotted Handfish native only to southeastern Australia.
Many of these pests are enormously expensive in the damage that they
cause and in the annual control costs that they necessitate every year: e.g., a
few hundred million dollars per year for rabbits, $600 million for flies and

ticks of livestock, $200 million for a pasture mite, $2.5 billion for other in
sect pests, over $3 billion for weeds, and so on.

Thus, Australia has an exceptionally fragile environment, damaged in a
multitude of ways incurring enormous economic costs. Some of those costs
stem from past damage that is now irreversible, such as some forms of land
degradation and the extinctions of native species (relatively more species in
recent times in Australia than on any other continent). Most of the types of damage are still ongoing today, or even increasing or accelerating as in the
case of old-growth forest logging in Tasmania. Some of the damaging
processes are virtually impossible to halt now because of long built-in time delays, such as the effects of slow underground downhill flows of already-
mobilized saline groundwater that will continue to spread for centuries.
Many Australian cultural attitudes, as well as government policies, remain the ones that caused damage in the past and are still continuing to cause it.
For instance, among the political obstacles to a reform of water policies are obstacles arising from a market for "water licenses" (rights to extract water
for irrigation). The purchasers of those licenses understandably feel that
they actually own the water that they have paid dearly to extract, even
though full exercise of the licenses is impossible because the total amount of
water for which licenses have been issued may exceed the amount of water
available in a normal year.

To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober think
ing, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are
doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environ
ment. That is an entirely realistic scenario for Australia's future
—much
more likely than either a plunge into an Easter Island-like population crash
and political collapse as prophesized by doomsday advocates, or a continua
tion of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely as
sumed by many of Australia's current politicians and business leaders. The
implausibility of the latter two scenarios, and the realistic prospects of the
first scenario, apply to the rest of the First World as well, with the sole differ
ence that Australia could end up in the first scenario sooner.

Fortunately, there are signs of hope. They involve changing attitudes,
rethinking by Australia's farmers, private initiatives, and the beginnings
of radical governmental initiatives. All that rethinking illustrates a theme
that we already encountered in connection with the Greenland Norse (Chap
ter 8), and to which we shall return in Chapters 14 and 16: the challenge

of deciding which of a society's deeply held core values are compatible with
the society's survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.

When I first visited Australia 40 years ago, many Australian landowners
responded to criticism that they were damaging their land for future gen
erations or producing damage for other people by responding, "It's my
land, and I can bloody well do with it whatever I bloody please." While one
still hears such attitudes today, they are becoming less frequent and less
publicly acceptable. Whereas the government until a few decades ago faced
little resistance to its enforcing environmentally destructive regulations
(e.g.,
requiring
land clearance) and putting through environmentally de
structive schemes (e.g., the Murray River dams and the Ord River Scheme),
the Australian public today, like the public in Europe, North America, and
other areas, is increasingly vocal on environmental matters. Public opposition has been especially loud to land clearance, river development, and old-growth logging. At the moment that I write these lines, those public
attitudes have just resulted in the South Australian state government's insti
tuting a new tax (thereby breaking an election promise) to raise $300 million to undo damage to the Murray River; the Western Australian state government's proceeding with the phasing-out of old-growth logging; the
New South Wales state government and its farmers' reaching agreement on a $406 million plan to streamline resource management and end large-scale
land clearing; and the state government in Queensland, historically the
most conservative Australian state, announcing a joint proposal with the
national (Commonwealth) government to end large-scale clearing of ma
ture bushland by the year 2006. All of these measures were unimaginable
40 years ago.

These signs of hope include changed attitudes of the voting public as a whole, resulting in changed governmental policies. Another sign of hope involves changed attitudes of farmers in particular, who are increasingly
realizing that the farming methods of the past cannot be sustained and
wouldn't permit them to pass on their farms in good condition to their chil
dren. That prospect hurts Australian farmers, because (like the Montana
farmers whom I interviewed for Chapter 1) it's love for the farming lifestyle,
rather than farming's meager financial rewards, that motivates them to
carry on with the hard work of being farmers. Symbolic of those changed
attitudes was a conversation that I had with sheep farmer Bill Mcintosh, the
one whom I mentioned as having mapped, bulldozed, and dynamited the rabbit warrens on his farm, which had belonged to his family since 1879.
He showed me photos of the same hill, taken in 1937 and in 1999, and illus-

trating dramatically the sparse vegetation in 1937 due to sheep overstocking and the vegetation's subsequent recovery. Among his own measures to keep
his farm sustainable, he is stocking sheep at levels below those considered as
an acceptable maximum by the government, and is thinking about switching to wool-less sheep kept just for meat production (because they require
less attention and less land). As one method of coping with the weed prob
lem and preventing less palatable plant species from taking over pasture, he has adopted a practice termed "cell grazing," under which sheep are not per
mitted to eat just the most palatable plants and then moved to the next pas
ture, but are instead left in the same pasture until they have been forced to
consume its less palatable as well as its more palatable plants. Astonishingly
to me, he keeps costs down and manages the entire farm without any full-
time employee besides himself, by herding his several thousand sheep while
riding on his motorbike, carrying binoculars and a radio and accompanied by his dog. Simultaneously, he somehow makes time for trying to develop
other sources of business income, such as bed-and-breakfast tourism, be
cause he recognizes that his farm alone would be marginal in the long run.

Farmer peer pressure, in combination with recently changed govern
ment policies, is reducing stocking rates and improving pasture conditions.
In inland parts of South Australia where the government owns land fit for
pastoralism and leases it to farmers on 42-year leases, an agency called the
Pastoral Board assesses the land's condition every 14 years, reduces the per
missible stocking rate if the vegetation's condition is not improving, and revokes the lease if it decides that the farmer/tenant was managing the property unsatisfactorily. Closer to the coast, land tends to be owned out
right (as freehold) or under perpetual lease, so that such direct governmen
tal control is not possible, but there is still indirect control enforced in two
ways. By law, landowners or leaseholders still bear a "duty-of-care" obligation to prevent land degradation. The first stage of enforcement involves lo
cal farmer boards that monitor degradation and apply peer pressure to try
to achieve compliance. The second stage depends on soil conservators who
can intervene if the local board is not effective. Bill Mcintosh related to me
four cases in which local boards or soil conservators in his area ordered
farmers to reduce sheep stocking rates, or actually confiscated the property
when the farmer did not obey.

Among Australia's many innovative private initiatives to address envi
ronmental problems are several that I encountered while visiting a former
sheep and farm property of nearly 1,000 square miles near the Murray
River, called Calperum Station. First leased for grazing in 1851, it fell victim

to the usual panoply of Australian environmental problems: deforestation,
foxes, land clearance by chaining and burning, overirrigation, overstocking,
rabbits, salinization, weeds, wind erosion, and so on. In 1993 it was bought by the Australian Commonwealth Government and the Chicago Zoological
Society, the latter (despite being U.S.-based) already attracted by Australia's pioneering efforts in developing ecologically sustainable land practices. For
some years after that purchase, government managers applied top-down
control and gave orders to local community volunteers, who became increasingly frustrated, until in 1998 control was turned over to the private
Australian Landscape Trust mobilizing 400 local volunteers for bottom-up
community management. The trust is funded in large degree by Australia's largest private philanthropic organization, The Potter Foundation, which is
expressly concerned with reversing the degradation of Australia's farmland.

Under the trust's management, local volunteers at Calperum threw
themselves into whatever projects appealed to each volunteer's own interest.
By thus enlisting volunteers, this private initiative has been able to accom
plish far more than would have been possible with the limited available gov
ernment funds alone. Volunteers trained at Calperum have then gone on to
use those skills to undertake other conservation projects elsewhere. Among
the projects that I saw, one volunteer was devoting herself to a small endan
gered kangaroo species whose population she was trying to restore; another volunteer preferred to poison foxes, one of the area's most damaging introduced pest species; and still other volunteers were attacking the ubiquitous
problem of rabbits, seeking ways to control introduced carp in the Murray
River, perfecting a strategy for non-chemical control of insect pests of citrus
trees, restoring lakes that had become sterile, revegetating overgrazed land,
and developing markets for growing and selling local wildflowers and
plants controlling erosion. These efforts deserve a prize for imagination and
enthusiasm. Literally tens of thousands of other such private initiatives are
operating around Australia: for instance, another organization that also
grew in part out of The Potter Foundation's Potter Farmland Plan, called
Landcare, is helping 15,000 individual farmers wanting to help themselves
to pass on their farms in decent condition to their children.

Complementing these imaginative private initiatives are government initiatives that include a radical rethinking of Australian agriculture, in re
sponse to growing awareness of the seriousness of Australia's problems. It is too early to guess whether any of these radical plans will be adopted, but the
fact that salaried government employees are being permitted and even paid to develop them is remarkable. The proposals are not coming from idealis-