While land degradation resulting from all those causes is Australia’s most expensive environmental problem, five other sets of serious problems deserve briefer mention: those involving forestry, marine fisheries, freshwater fisheries, freshwater itself, and alien species.
Apart from Antarctica, Australia is the continent with proportionately the least area covered by forests: only about 20% of the continent’s total area. They used to include possibly the world’s tallest trees, now-felled Victorian Mountain Ash, rivaling or topping California Coast Redwoods in height. Of Australia’s forests standing at the time of European settlement in 1788, 40% have already been cleared, 35% have been partly logged, and only 25% remain intact. Nevertheless, logging of that small area of remaining old-growth forests is continuing and constitutes yet another instance of mining the Australian landscape.
The export uses (in addition to domestic consumption) to which timber logged from Australia’s remnant forests is being put are remarkable. Of forest product exports, half are not in the form of logs or finished materials but are turned into wood chips and sent mostly to Japan, where they are used to produce paper and its products and make up one-quarter of the material in Japanese paper. While the price that Japan pays to Australia for those wood chips has dropped to $7 per ton, the resulting paper sells in Japan for $1,000 per ton, so that almost all of the value added to the timber after it is cut accrues to Japan rather than to Australia. At the same time as it exports wood chips, Australia imports nearly three times more forest products than it exports, with more than half of those imports being in the form of paper and paperboard products.
Thus, the Australian forest products trade involves a double irony. On the one hand, Australia, one of the First World countries with the least forest, is still logging those shrinking forests to export their products to Japan, the First World country with the highest percentage of its land under forest (74%) and with that percentage still growing. Second, Australia’s forest products trade in effect consists of exporting raw material at a low price, to be converted in another country into finished material at a high price and with high added value, and then importing finished materials. One expects to encounter that particular type of asymmetry not in the trade relations between two First World countries, but instead when an economically backward, non-industrialized Third World colony unsophisticated at negotiations deals with a First World country sophisticated at exploiting Third World countries, buying their raw materials cheaply, adding value to the materials at home, and exporting expensive manufactured goods to the colony. (Japan’s major exports to Australia include cars, telecommunications equipment, and computing equipment, while coal and minerals are Australia’s other major exports to Japan.) That is, it would appear that Australia is squandering a valuable resource and receiving little money for it.
The continued logging of old-growth forests is giving rise to one of the most passionate environmental debates in Australia today. Most of the logging and the fiercest debate are going on in the state of Tasmania, where Tasmania Mountain Ash, at up to 305 feet tall some of the world’s tallest remaining trees outside of California, are now being logged faster than ever. Both of Australia’s major political parties, at both the state and federal levels, favor continued logging of Tasmanian old-growth forests. A possible reason is suggested by the fact that, after the National Party announced its strong support for Tasmanian logging in 1995, it became known that the party’s three biggest financial contributors were logging companies.
In addition to mining its old-growth forests, Australia has also planted agroforestry plantations, both of native and of non-native tree species. For all the reasons mentioned previously—low soil nutrient levels, low and unpredictable rainfall, and resulting low growth rates of trees—agroforestry is much less profitable and faces higher costs in Australia than in 12 out of the 13 countries that are among its principal competitors. Even Australia’s most valuable commercially surviving timber tree species, the Tasmanian Blue Gum, grows faster and more profitably in overseas plantations where it has been planted (in Brazil, Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Vietnam) than in Tasmania itself.
The mining of Australia’s marine fisheries resembles that of its forests. Basically, Australia’s tall trees and lush grass deceived the first European settlers into overrating Australia’s potential for food production on land: in technical terms used by ecologists, the land supported large standing crops but low productivity. The same is true of Australia’s oceans, whose productivity is low because it depends on nutrient runoff from that same unproductive land, and because Australian coastal waters lack nutrient-rich upwellings comparable to the Humboldt current off the west coast of South America. Australia’s marine populations tend to have low growth rates, so that they are easily overfished. For example, within the last two decades there has been a worldwide boom in a fish called Orange Roughy, caught in Australian and New Zealand waters and providing the basis of a fishery that has been profitable in the short term. Unfortunately, closer studies showed that Orange Roughy are very slow-growing, they do not start to breed until they are about 40 years old, and the fish caught and eaten are often 100 years old. Hence Orange Roughy populations cannot possibly breed fast enough to replace the adults being removed by fishermen, and that fishery is now in decline.
Australia has exhibited a history of marine overfishing: mining one stock until it is depleted to uneconomically low levels, then discovering a new fishery and switching to it until it too collapses within a short time, like a gold rush. After a new fishery opens, a scientific study by marine biologists may be initiated to determine the maximal sustainable harvesting rates, but the fishery is at risk of collapsing before recommendations from the study become available. Australian victims of such overfishing, besides Orange Roughy, include Coral Trout, Eastern Gemfish, Exmouth Gulf Tiger Prawns, School Sharks, Southern Bluefin Tuna, and Tiger Flathead. The only Australian marine fishery for which there are well-supported claims of sustainable harvesting involves the Western Australian rock lobster population, which is currently Australia’s most valuable seafood export and whose healthy status has been evaluated independently by the Marine Stewardship Council (to be discussed in Chapter 15).
Like its marine fisheries, Australia’s freshwater fisheries as well are limited by low productivity because of low nutrient runoff from the unproductive land. Also like the marine fisheries, the freshwater fisheries have deceptively large standing crops but low production. For example, Australia’s largest freshwater fish species is the Murray Cod, up to three feet long and confined to the Murray/Darling river system. It is good eating, highly valued, and formerly so abundant that it used to be caught and shipped to markets by the truckload. Now, the Murray Cod fishery has been closed because of the decline and collapse of the catch. Among the causes of that collapse are the overharvesting of a slow-growing fish species, as in the case of Orange Roughy; effects of introduced carp, which increase water turbidity; and several consequences of dams built on the Murray River in the 1930s, which interrupted fish spawning movements, decreased river water temperature (because dam managers released cold bottom water too cold for the fish’s reproduction, rather than warmer surface water), and converted a river formerly receiving periodic nutrient inputs from floods into permanent bodies of water with little nutrient renewal.
Today, the financial yield from Australia’s freshwater fisheries is trivial. For instance, all freshwater fisheries in the state of South Australia generate only $450,000 per year, divided among 30 people who fish only as a part-time occupation. A properly managed sustainable fishery for Murray Cod and Golden Perch, the Murray/Darling’s other economically valuable fish species, could surely yield far more money than that, but it is unknown whether damage to Murray/Darling fisheries is now irreversible.
As for freshwater itself, Australia is the continent with the least of it. Most of that little freshwater that is readily accessible to populated areas is already utilized for drin
king or agriculture. Even the country’s largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two-thirds of its total water flow drawn off by humans in an average year, and in some years virtually all of its water. Australia’s freshwater sources that remain unutilized consist mainly of rivers in remote northern areas, far from human settlements or agricultural lands where they could be put to use. As Australia’s population grows, and as its unutilized supplies of freshwater dwindle, some settled areas may be forced to turn to more expensive desalinization for their freshwater. There is already a desalinization plant on Kangaroo Island, and one may be needed soon on the Eyre Peninsula.
Several major projects in the past to modify unutilized Australian rivers have turned out to be costly failures. For instance, in the 1930s it was proposed to build several dozen dams along the Murray River in order to permit freight traffic by ship, and about half of those planned dams were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before the plan was abandoned. There is now no commercial freight traffic on the Murray River, but the dams did contribute to the already-mentioned collapse of the Murray Cod fishery. One of the most expensive failures was the Ord River Scheme, which involved damming a river in a remote and sparsely populated area of northwestern Australia in order to irrigate land for growing barley, corn, cotton, safflower, soybeans, and wheat. Eventually, only cotton among all those crops was grown on a small scale and failed after 10 years. Sugar and melons are now being produced there, but the value of their yield does not come close to matching the project’s great expense.
In addition to those problems of water quantity, accessibility, and use, there are also issues of water quality. Utilized rivers contain toxins, pesticides, or salts from upstream that reach urban drinking areas and agricultural irrigation areas downstream. Examples that I already mentioned are the salt and agricultural chemicals from the Murray River, which furnishes much of Adelaide’s drinking water, and the pesticides from New South Wales and Queensland cotton fields, which jeopardize the marketability 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 already 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 thousand 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 Australian 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 insect 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 thinking, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment. 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 continuation of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely assumed 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 difference 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 (Chapter 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 generations 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 destructive 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 instituting 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’ re
aching 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 mature 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 children. 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 illustrating 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 problem and preventing less palatable plant species from taking over pasture, he has adopted a practice termed “cell grazing,” under which sheep are not permitted to eat just the most palatable plants and then moved to the next pasture, 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, because he recognizes that his farm alone would be marginal in the long run.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Page 54