The critical renewable resources of soil and water are being used up, with costs being borne by farmers. The soils of one-quarter of the world’s arable land are in a highly degraded state, while agricultural land is being lost through urbanisation and further land degradation. What are we doing with this precious resource? The average arable land per person in the world is 2100 m², with an annual loss of 1 per cent. It is therefore important to regenerate degrading soils, making them productive again through sound management practices, while also protecting agricultural land in peri-urban areas to improve local food production systems, shorten food miles and secure freshness for health.

Issues about food need involvement from urban consumers. Consumers need to know where, when and how their food is produced and processed. Changes in urban food provisioning are needed for equitable food security and health, and consumers generally need to reduce food waste and regain respect for food generally. Most food is now produced with synthetic fertilisers and chemicals and over-processed with artificial additives, leading to nutrition-related chronic diseases. The health and wellbeing of urbanised people requires regeneration of sustainable, decentralised, community-based food systems—from production to distribution, processing, marketing, shopping, preparing and eating—while ecological principles have to be incorporated in management practices to restore the cycles of life on agricultural land as functioning agroecosystems.

Industrial Agriculture, Food and Health

World-wide, modern agriculture is degrading soils to ever lower fertility, leading to dependency on fossil fuel-related synthetic fertilisers and chemicals to obtain the highest yields. The Green Revolution is stalling, yields have plateaued. To offset degrading soils, more and more inputs are being applied to maintain yields, creating a self-perpetuating system of dependence on artificial inputs. In turn, production practices have gradually led to food with low nutrient density and chemical residue contamination, affecting human health and increasing chronic disease.

Food at the farm gate now takes far more energy to produce than is generated in edible calories. Globally, agriculture accounts for more than 20 per cent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and producers are pressured to reduce these. At the same time, the global marketplace for inputs and outputs of industrial farming is under pressure given decreasing oil supplies.

Current recommended practices use harsh synthetics and ignore the delicate balance of microbes, humus, trace minerals and nutrients in soil. Such practices expose roots to harsh conditions, making them more sensitive to saline or acid conditions, and the whole plant more susceptible to environmental conditions such as drought, heat and frost. Synthetic, water-soluble fertilisers make plants more susceptible to diseases and insects, with plants growing out of balance in rapid growth response to the few easy available nutrients provided. Management practices like these have led to marked losses in soil organic carbon and decimated the diversity and abundance of organisms in the soil foodweb. In turn the biodiversity of landscapes has been greatly reduced and many species are threatened.

Disruption of the soil’s biological and chemical processes by pesticides and fertilisers usually leads to physical problems like increased compaction, reduced water infiltration, water and wind erosion, and loss of nutrients to surface- and groundwater. Increased demand for price-competitive animal products has led to factory farming, where large numbers of animals are fed grain in confined areas, affecting animal welfare, food quality and waste disposal. Science and industry have also embraced genetic modification (GM) technology as a solution to food problems.

In GM, foreign species’ genes with desired traits are injected into selected food and fibre crops. This approach, however, does not treat the cause of problems, as crops on degrading soils remain dependent on synthetic inputs. Farmers also lose their ability to save seed, as GM seed has to be purchased every season. The genetic diversity of seed stocks decreases markedly, increasing vulnerability to biotic, or living, and abiotic, or non-living, factors, for example, disease or drought. Despite the promises that GM will improve yield, drought tolerance, food quality, fertiliser efficiency and so forth, only the management tools of herbicide tolerance (for example, glyphosate) and insect resistance are commercialised GM traits. GM yields have not increased and pesticide use has risen to combat problems of resistance, with one group of insecticides or herbicides replacing another. Herbicide use has increased and glyphosate hazards to crops, soils, animals and people are becoming apparent, while weed resistances keep developing, requiring more herbicide applications. New diseases and pests keep appearing that need chemical control.

Another key issue hardly raised is the decreased mineral density of foods at the farm gate; mineral density has more than halved over the past sixty years. This follows decades of breeding for high yields with synthetic fertilisers and selection for look, taste, shape, use in processing, shelf-life and transportability, but rarely quality. Mineral density can be 20 to 80 per cent lower when using glyphosate herbicide on tolerant GM crops as glyphosate immobilises nutrients, thus lowering uptake. The quality of animal products produced in factory farms with grain, hormones, antibiotics and steroids is also questionable. Current modes of urban food provisioning affect food quality through transport, refrigeration and long storage. Packaging keeps produce looking attractive and fresh, but green vegetables lose nutrition for every day stored. For ease of use, taste, look and shelf-life, foods are being highly processed. Refining, heating and extrusion are detrimental processes, removing or locking up minerals.

Synthetic chemicals poison or confuse most life forms. The direct impacts of chemicals as poisons are studied pending release of products by regulators who set safety levels to their intended use. However, frequent use over time and cocktail effects with other chemicals are not measured. A chemical may only be taken off the market when problems become obvious. DDT was the first example, as described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962). Connections between synthetic chemicals in food are increasingly being found to be associated with chronic diseases, yet medical research concentrates on cure rather than prevention.

In similar vein, GM produce has not been proven safe by the GM industry. The scientists involved claim GM crops have undergone more tests before release than any non-GM crop, but this is hardly an argument. Neither multi-generation animal feeding nor agroecological plant–soil–animal–human links have been studied, nor is there surveillance of GM-food consumption. Independent research is not permitted but those who have done long-term animal feeding studies have found health problems with liver, blood, immunity, allergens and fertility. Recently Professor Giles-Eric Seralini found GM corn both toxic and carcinogenic for rats in a two-year study. His study outcomes received unmitigated criticism about the inappropriateness of the methodologies used. I have been asking CSIRO for such a study all along. We have to ask why GM scientists are not doing such studies themselves.

Food Production Enhancing Biodiversity

Recent UN studies of world food production report the need to shift to agroecological approaches. Agroecology is the science behind productive, low-risk farming in harmony with nature, farming that overcomes the need for synthetic fertilisers and chemicals.

Studies include those by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (2006), the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (2008), UN Special Rapporteur De Schutter (2010), and the UN Environment Programme (2011). For a global perspective, most use the large 2006 overview study by Professor Jules Pretty which covers projects in fifty-seven developing countries, where average crop yields increased by 79 per cent. These UN agencies have concluded that agroecological training of farmers in developing countries, representing more than 1 billion people, will greatly improve people’s livelihoods in local communities and reduce migration to cities.

It will be more difficult to re-train farmers (and scientists) who have grown up with industrial farming. Industrial farmers find themselves on a treadmill they cannot easily step off. Worldwide, however, some practitioners, professionals and scientists have broken away from the mainstream after becoming aware of the negative impacts on the environment and on human health. In India whole villages are changing from high-input, high-risk, unprofitable Green Revolution farming to agroecological farming using improved indigenous knowledge. This move away from industrial farming is happening world-wide and has led to so-called alternative farming practices that follow agroecological principles, for example, ’organic’, ‘biodynamic’, ‘low external input’ and ‘biological’. They use biological inputs as stimulants (for example, seaweed), inoculants (for example, vermiculture), mineral fertilisers (for example, rock phosphate) or fertilisers (for example, composted manure). Compost and compost tea (water extract from compost) are universal inputs serving all four categories.

Comparisons between such agroecological systems and industrial agriculture have been made and show the former’s great potential, but adoption of these practices is poor because of a lack of advisory services and our low capacity for biosensitivity. Successful producers, the innovators and early adopters, seem to have a capacity for biosensitivity—a ‘gut feeling’, ‘green thumb’, ‘third eye’ or ‘sixth sense’. This allows them to feel and sense intuitively what is good for the soil, plants and animals. Organic agriculture has become the most widely recognised agroecological movement. Those who actively manage soil health with biosensitivity achieve yields similar to their industrial farming neighbours without using synthetics. Those who do not have that capacity usually have low yields as ecology is not reactivated. It is these examples that provide the so-called proof in agricultural science for the view that ‘organics only achieves half the yields’ and that ‘we can’t feed the world with organic farming’.

Degrading soils, rising input costs and difficulties in making the shift to organics led to the development of biological agriculture, which allows minimum use of synthetic fertilisers and chemicals. Emerging in the United States as a practice distinct from organics, biological agriculture is an easily adopted agroecological practice. It takes the best practices and materials from industrial and organic agriculture to enable farmers to make a profitable, gradual transition towards organics. Healthy soils are created step by step using biological inputs, thus minimising synthetic inputs that work against biology and balance. Fungicides and insecticides, which also kill beneficial microbes, are avoided and are not needed in any case as plants become resistant to pests. Pests become indicators of unbalanced plants; weeds become indicators of unbalanced  soils. Further agroecosystem improvements to develop fields within a sustainable landscape may be achieved by managing natural energies and water through permaculture, Yeomans’ Keyline Design or Natural Sequence Farming principles.

Healthy Soils with Carbon for Healthy Food 

A healthy soil in an agroecosystem is a soil in harmony—with the physics, chemistry and biology in balance. These factors are interactive and have strong links with soil organic carbon, the foundation for a living soil and life on earth. Soil biology seems to be the driver, using the diversity and abundance of microbes (algae, bacteria, fungi) and larger organisms (mites, beetles, earthworms) in the soil foodweb. Genes switch on and off in order to adapt to local conditions, and plants in healthy soils become more productive by activation of gene expression for self-protection. Microbial activity forms soil aggregates—crumbs—for stable soil structure. This feature greatly benefits soil aeration, which is important for water infiltration, and allowing deep and dense root systems. Soil structure and soil carbon are also aided by earthworms (present only when there is an abundance of microbes), which make humus.

The organisms in a soil foodweb work together by creating a home to sustain life. Beneficial organisms make soil nutrients plant-available and protect plants against insects and diseases. Abundant and diverse soil biology ensures that under all circumstances there are beneficial species active to undertake any task. Symbiosis is this balanced, mutual interdependence of different species. It is a protective mechanism in nature that develops in response to compatible needs. Such systems run on carbon, water and nitrogen free from the sky. A healthy soil is a self-organising system that endeavours to optimise the environment for optimum plant growth. Soil microbes feed nutrients to plants on demand and in return they are fed carbon exudates from the roots, which ultimately become soil organic carbon.

Soil health requires biodiversity not only in soils but also in the surrounding landscape, for example, in predator–prey species and pollinators. Windbreaks and shelterbelts improve the soil surface microclimate and provide a ‘home’ for the aerial component of the soil foodweb. Ecology is about balance. Too little is deficient and too much is toxic; it has to be just right for each factor, the balance being achieved through self-regulation. In agroecological farming, except organics, synthetic fertilisers and chemicals can be applied in small amounts, below toxic levels that would breach critical thresholds. A functional agroecosystem is resilient as it can recover from such a small application. It is the larger, combined and repeated applications that cause system collapse.

Soil organic carbon with a large humus proportion acts as a sponge for water, air and nutrient retention, and a home for soil biology. Soil carbon is of critical importance for soil fertility but has generally been more than halved (up to 80 per cent) with industrial agriculture and thus has significantly contributed to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In Australia, soil carbon content is now less than 1 per cent for most fields.

Soil carbon above 2 per cent makes plant growth markedly less susceptible to environmental conditions, because minerals and water are more available to plants, and there is less variation in diurnal soil temperature. Soil organic carbon is maximised through capture by green plants, ground cover being important in this respect. In Australia, with agroecological management, topsoil organic carbon can increase more than ten times faster than the 1 per cent over forty years science says is possible under industrial agriculture best management practice. Sequestration of carbon at depth is also higher because of greater root activity with microbes that make humus: three to eight tonnes of carbon per hectare per year is achievable.

Thus soil carbon not only improves soil fertility, it also helps to slow global warming through lowering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It further restores the water cycle by maintaining moist topsoils, with dew formation and evapotranspiration keeping the soil surface cooler, thereby attracting rainfall. Once confirmed by science, and with the relevant policy changes, soil management via agroecological practices could become an option for carbon credit payments to farmers.

Observations in Practice

The shift away from industrial farming is important but difficult as agroecology is seen through a different lens from industrial farming and felt with biosensitivity. The understanding of such complex systems grows with personal experience. Farmers and gardeners have to monitor and measure, and know what to look for in learning a new production system Learning to interpret what is happening is key. Holistic Management is an approach that provides support for such change where complex farming systems are seen within a landscape and farmers address the ‘whole’ to bring about effective management. This requires learning how to simplify operations, decrease reliance on inputs and restore the land, which in turn enable increased farm profitability, family harmony and improved ecological footprint. To work with nature’s complexity we must focus on the important processes that operate in any ecosystem, which are also the four foundation blocks of agroecosystems: the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the flow of energy, and community dynamics.

Agroecological farming systems are also greatly supported using permaculture principles. As David Holmgren has noted, perma(nent agri)culture is about consciously designed landscapes that mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, allowing an abundance of food, fibre and energy for local needs. The movement has a worldwide following and great results in urban farming. In subsistence farming the first steps are the use of polycultures, composting, controlled grazing and capturing rainfall. Budgets can remain the same when starting from high-input farming but with a gradual change to biological inputs. Generally, in the first year returns per dollar invested are at least equal, but with visible soil improvement as a bonus. After two or three years, fertiliser use may be halved and chemical use lowered by 80 per cent. Production is usually similar to one’s industrial farming neighbours in normal years and higher in years affected by drought or frost. Financial outcomes have lower highs but higher lows. Operating with lower risk and avoiding chemicals greatly improves the health and well-being of farming communities.

Science

Science is critically lagging behind the new directions of producers and consumers, and is generally not providing scientific support. Indeed its first response seems always to be the shrill question: ‘Where is the proof?’  The working agroecological farming systems of experienced producers cannot be replicated by science and are therefore rejected, such successes being viewed as merely ‘anecdotal’.

R&D in multifunctional agriculture is fragmented and lacks a unified direction for studying the sustainability of systems. Complex, self-adjusting, cyclical biological systems are in fact difficult to quantify, but that is at least in part because current specialisation and multi-factorial research methodology is inadequate. Specialised disciplines are connected in nature but separated by artificial lines in science. Further, science and governments are influenced by multinational corporations and stick to the current path of industrial agriculture. Personal values, habits, experiences and intended outcomes influence scientists to remain with the current paradigm as they formulate their hypotheses, develop experimental designs, pose experimental questions and complete data collection and analysis. The current powers that fund research thus keep getting the answers they expect (and want). The resulting food production systems and associated business models, however, are unlikely to ever stop land degradation, provide equitable food security or deliver required food quality. GM technology rollout, for example, is controlled by GM company contracts that prevent the publishing of negative findings. After ten to fifteen years unintended outcomes for environment, animals and people are gradually becoming visible and are being published.

Agricultural science needs a paradigm shift to a holistic, transdisciplinary approach to describe how cycles keep operating rather than why they work; tackling the ‘whole’ not through ‘mechanism’ (a linear model) but through ‘organism’ (a cyclical model).

Scaling Up for Change

We need functioning agroecosystems across landscapes, regions and countries. Only then, with supportive urban-rural interaction, can local food security, biodiverse landscapes and slowing of global warming be achieved. Cuba is the only country developing such systems nationwide. On a smaller, regional scale, successes have been achieved in Brazil, Malawi, Niger and China. Scaling up requires appropriate public policy to create enabling environments for such productive and earth-enhancing modes of production. UN agencies have to connect with non-governmental organisations and networks of farmers practising such farming, and consumers wanting real, local food and a clean, biodiverse environment.

Successful transition requires governments at all levels to create an enabling environment for production, trading and consumption of local food by communities and small business, which is food sovereignty. Education of students, consumers and producers in preventative health of self and community, plants, animals and earth is critical. Science must develop a unified methodology to study agroecosystems holistically, with governments, producers and consumers connecting with scientists to solve problems encountered in local practice. What we need is local solutions for global healing.

References 

Agroecology: J. Pretty (2006) Agroecological Approaches to Agricultural Development, <http://www.rimisp.org/getdoc.php?docid=6440>.

Biological agriculture:  <http://BioLogicAgFood.com.au>, including Australian Story, ‘Back to Earth’, about Maarten Stapper’s introduction to biological farming systems and disconnect with official science world.

Biosensitivity: Nature and Society Forum, <http://www.biosensitivefutures.org.au/>.

Dietary dangers: Weston Price Foundation, <http://www.westonaprice.org/basics/dietary-dangers>.

Food and health: C. Hungerford (2006) Good Health in the 21^st Century, <http://www.carolehungerford.com.au/index.htm>.

Food quality comparisons: The Organic Center USA: state of science reviews about nutritional superiority and pesticide risk, <http://www.organic-center.org/science.tocreports.html>.

Genetic Modification (GM): Michael Antoniou (2012) GMO Myths and Truths: an evidence-based examination of the claims made for the safety and efficacy of GM crops, <http://earthopensource.org/files/pdfs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3.pdf>.

Holistic Management: A. Savory (1999) Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making,Washington DC, Island Press.

Permaculture: David Holmgren (2002) Permaculture, Principles & Pathways beyond Sustainability, Holmgren Design Services.

World Food: Olivier De Schutter (2010) UN Special Rapporteur Report:The Right to Food, <http://www.srfood.org/>; and the 2008 IAASTD  report : Agriculture at a Crossroads, <http://www.agassessment.org/>.

A central feature of the Basin Plan is the introduction of a practice known as sustainable diversion limits (SDLs). This mechanism is designed to enforce limits on the amount of water that can be taken out of the Basin’s surface and groundwater supplies. Checks and balances designed to manage water quality and salinity levels also feature in the Basin master plan. In the longer-term the plan is designed to return between 27–37 per cent of surface water to the system. At the more specific level this will mean some regions face extensive reductions to current levels of water taken from the rivers.

Release of the long awaited Basin Plan has produced predictable responses generating strongly polarised reaction based on long standing social divisions. Wide-ranging tensions feed into, and are sustained by, an increasingly dysfunctional political framework that is conflictual, divided and parochial and perpetuated by a compromised, biased and corporatised mass media. This article acknowledges the coexistence of a number of narratives from different times, which have now become interwoven into the neo-liberal discourse about the rationalising powers of the marketplace. The analysis highlights the links between the colonial heritage of the production of export materials; the key role of irrigation schemes in the process of ‘nation building’; the nexus between water control and public policy; and, finally, global trade and water use.

Background

The Murray–Darling Basin covers 1,061,469 square kilometres or approximately one-seventh (14 per cent) of the total area of Australia (7,692,024 square kilometres).

It contains over 40 per cent of all Australian farms, which produce wool, cotton, wheat, sheep, cattle, dairy produce, rice, oil-seed, wine, fruit and vegetables for both domestic and overseas markets. As Australia’s most important <http://www.murrayriver.com.au/about-the-murray/murray-darling-basin/#agriculture> agricultural region, the Basin produces one third of Australia’s food supply and supports over a third of Australia’s total gross value of <http://www.murrayriver.com.au/about-the-murray/murray-darling-basin/#agriculture> agricultural production.

Assumptions about land, agricultural production, economic development and security, and water are fused in this statement (sourced from the Murray River tourism website). It is an example of a sustained narrative about social economic and political priorities, a meta-discourse that frames thinking about water flow and use in this large area of the nation.

In only two hundred years the Murray–Darling Basin has become a centrepiece of integrated economic development and cross-sector management practices. Within the post-colonial history of this region there are many examples of trendsetting policy development and technically advanced and large-scale forms of development. A good deal of the political impetus and economic investments of these changes has been the drive towards ‘nation building’. Water management has been a central feature of these processes.

Viewed historically there are three major phases in this narrative of social change. Before sketching each in a little detail a caveat is required. Within the landmass and waterways associated with what is now codified as the Murray–Darling Basin the doctrine of terra nullius cannot apply. The Basin has a long history as a demographic centre of Indigenous life. Australia’s oldest known skeleton was found in this area, at Lake Mungo in southwest New South Wales, and anthropological records show that before colonisation the region contained the highest density of Indigenous groups anywhere on the continent. The rich bio-diversity of the area existing within the confluence of a large number of rivers and streams provided a wide range of food sources. These river systems also acted as meeting places of people from many different groups. Consequently a large number of important cultural sites are located throughout the region. Many Aboriginal people died as a result of diseases brought into the country by colonists; however, a significant number of Indigenous Australians representing many different groups continue to live in the region.

Developments through the 19th Century

Through the 19th century the Murray–Darling Basin was settled and maintained within a field of tension between two opposing forces. The region became a provider of wool for the burgeoning fabric industries of northern England; at the same time large areas of the region were taken up in pastoral leases by settlers intent on forging a new way of life away from direct British influence. This phase of social change was a time of regional settlement that involved establishing maps and territorial boundaries, naming areas and features, including the rivers, and thereby establishing legislative control over the land and an increasing number of socio-economic activities. 

By the end of the century the political leaders of the different colonies, or proto-states, were engaged in prolonged negotiations designed to establish a post-colonial federation. Inside these discussions and political work were also moves to create a modern economy. For this to take place there was an urgent need for stable and reliable water supplies. Such sources were understood to be a fundamental requirement of inland population growth and the development of strong and economically viable agricultural and pastoral industries.

Politicians in Sydney and Melbourne were the most powerful in shaping an early form of regional water policy. This fact is reflected in the development of a number of key government policies which marked the beginning of a post-colonial water reform that would bring major water flow and storage under statutory legislation. The first of these occurred in Victoria when the government introduced the Irrigation Act 1886. In New South Wales similar legislation was passed in the Water Rights Act of 1896.

During this phase, bureaucratic and legislative infrastructure to govern water courses and adjacent public land was put in place. This necessitated breaking the nexus between private property and water ownership. In moving away from the legacy of European riparian thinking there was a shift towards an ethos of public ownership and control of water as a common property.

Despite such development, the cultural legacy of riverfront ownership lives on. Some properties in strategic locations with direct river access have been handed down through several generations. The history of riparian times remains within the restricted narratives of such groups.

Developments through the 20th Century

By the beginning of the 20th century this early form of water reform set the scene for the next major phase of change: large-scale water storage facilitating major irrigation developments. Three major developments stand out as key exemplars of this phase of change.

The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme is located in the Griffith-Leeton region of south-central New South Wales. While the area was understood to contain fertile soil, the larger and longer-term problem was the marginal and erratic rainfall. Using a variety of advanced engineering techniques, water was channeled into the area via a number of storages, locks and diversion canals.

By the beginning of World War II, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) was an important source of agriculture for the nation. The MIA developed through the employment of technical expertise, large-scale funding and, eventually, the arrival of skilled farmers. As a result a diversified economy was developed in which new export crops, including rice, became key products of the region. All of this was made possible through the entrapment and diversion of water into an area that did not have a history of consistent water flow.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme is a process involving water storage, re-direction and power generation. Water from the Snowy and Eucumbene rivers is diverted to the west, or inland, across the mountains where it is released into the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers. This diversion and controlled release of water has provided a wide range of agricultural developments using irrigated water. In what could now be labeled as ‘value adding’ this process of entrapment and storage of water has provided the opportunity for the generation of electricity.

The Menindee Lakes Scheme is situated on the Darling River in the far south-west of NSW. The scheme is a third example of a major development designed to capture and store a significant volume of water. Under normal conditions the Darling River flows unevenly, often running at a very low level via a long chain of waterholes and natural depressions that form lake systems.

In 1949 work commenced on creating a storage system comprised of dams, weirs, canals and flow regulators designed to control the flow of water. In 1968 work was completed leaving an integrated system that allowed water to be captured and stored in four linked lakes. From here water is diverted west to the mining centre of Broken Hill and also released back into the lower Darling River.

Communities including Broken Hill and Griffith have developed and sustain rich narratives about the benefits of water supplies directed into their locations. Such accounts acknowledge that there are many local beneficiaries of the water systems that sustain their communities.

Water Reform through Policy and Market Forces

In the early 1980s, fuelled by monetarist ideology, a politics of increasing economic stringency occurred. However, reformed water policy required an added input. Dating back to the 1960s a global discourse of environmental alarm, or crisis, had developed. Because this trend emerged on many different social, cultural and political fronts it impacted in many forms and a large number of locations. During this time ‘sustainability’ emerged as meta-environmental theme and merged with economic rationalist thinking, appearing in a wide suite of ‘environmentally friendly’ policies. A key example occurred in 1980 with the announcement of the World Conservation Strategy-ICUN 1980 which, in turn, was followed by the UN Brundtland Report of 1987. This document was, in effect, an argument for the need for all nations to undertake ‘sustainable development’ programs. Viewed holistically, it is a classic example of the fusion of economic management/environmental concern emerging ‘naturally’ in a discourse of sustainability.

Policy makers and politicians in Australia responded actively to this call for change through policy development and closer government management. The first change occurred at the governmental level. In 1992 Australia’s political leaders, the prime minister, state premiers and chief ministers constituted the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). COAG’s purpose was to streamline cross institutional communication and produce relevant generic policy. COAG first met in December that year, when it produced a statement called the National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development. This document detailed a number of guidelines that fused economic, environmental and equity issues against a backdrop of global awareness and sensitivities. Ecologically Sustainable Development became the banner for a new approach to water reform.

The most recent suite of policy reforms, as indicated in the following policy directive, includes a national water strategy, which involves the following foci:

The Murray Darling Basin: The Government is working to restore the Murray Darling Basin to a sustainable footing by modernising irrigation and addressing the over allocation of resources. This will put the Murray Darling Basin back on a sustainable track, significantly improve the health of rivers and wetlands and will bring substantial benefits to irrigators and the community; Purchasing water for the environment; Improving water use efficiency in rural Australia; and Urban water security projects <www.pm.gov.au/Policy_Priorities/Future/Priorities#Climate>.

What we find here is an amalgam of the key water policy initiatives of the previous one hundred years. The theme of ‘irrigation’ continues to be central, although it now involves new technologies and more stringent methods of management. In this latter sense this suggests more ‘rational’ measurement and monitoring of water allocation and the employment of more ‘effective’ water trading schemes.

Current Water Use Trends in the Murray–Darling Basin

While agriculture is no longer the major source of national wealth, this sector still accounts for use of approximately 65 per cent of stored water and over 50 per cent of the national land area. Embedded within these figures is the fact that just over 90 per cent of water in agricultural practice is used for irrigation, which includes ‘surface’ irrigation as the main method. Production of cotton, rice and grapevines mainly involves water through irrigation. Moreover, these crops are high water uses, with cotton farming using 16 per cent and rice 11 per cent of total agricultural water. The following information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reinforces understanding of the tight nexus between overall water use, irrigation practices and the production of rice and cotton:

Approximately 89 per cent of Australia’s cotton growers were located in the Murray–Darling Basin in 2008–09, irrigating 75 thousand hectares more land than in 2007–08 (up 141 per cent). The large increase in volume of irrigation water used was due to improved water allocations in the region. Similarly, Australia’s rice producers, all located in the Basin, used an increased volume of irrigation water in 2008–09.

In 2008–09, cotton accounted for the highest proportion of irrigation water used in the Murray–Darling Basin (23 per cent), followed by cereal crops for grain or seed (20 per cent) and pasture for grazing (15 per cent).

In this latter phase of change of water politics in the Murray–Darling Basin, cotton has emerged as the cash crop for current times. While other parts of the agriculture sector have been struggling, cotton farming has continued to develop for a number of reasons. Within a global context, cotton is grown within a latitude range of 45 degrees north through to 35 degrees south. The Murray–Darling Basin is thus securely located within this growth zone. Cotton is a crop that is planted and grown in an annual cycle. In the Australian growing season the growth cycle begins in September–November (planting) and ends in March–May (harvesting). As a broad-acre crop it is conducive to the use of large-scale/mechanised equipment in the planting, growth management (especially pest control) and harvesting stages. While the average sized farm in Australia is just over 300 hectares, cotton farming is an industry that lends itself to larger scale industrial development, including larger sized properties.

A key element in the production cycle is the availability of water. In this case the water trading policy and long-term irrigation infrastructure in the Murray–Darling Basin have helped encourage cotton production as an annual and broad-acre crop.

Cotton produced in Australia, and therefore in the Murray–Darling Basin, is an export crop. It is produced for the global market where the demand for cotton products is very high and thus the price or return on the commodity remains stable. According to cotton industry sources, 98 per cent of Australia’s cotton is exported. While overall production is low by world standards (only 3 per cent of world production) Australia contributes between 5–10 per cent of the world’s cotton exports. As an export industry this level of production generates a return of around $1.5 billion per annum.

Cotton is a quintessential global product. It has a very long history of use and has evolved to provide a wide range of commodities including clothing, multi-use commercial fibre, and as a food product for humans and animals. Moreover, cotton markets exist all over the globe. The increasing production of cotton in Australia, implying the growing use of water reserves, increasingly ties Australian production resources into the competitive global market. The export of cotton amounts to the export of large quantities of water.

Longer-term and Larger-scale Considerations

Modernist nation-building strategies have put in place large-scale water schemes designed to provide water for wide-ranging industrial and domestic purposes. While promoting demographic and economic growth, these practices have also resulted in over-production issues and helped create serious environmental problems. Current political strategies have been designed to address these concerns and have turned towards the logics of the marketplace. This is an approach designed to rationalise excessive demands for scarce water resources through the forces of competition.

In his essay ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Garrett Hardin made a number of observations that remain useful on population growth, resource management and political action. Hardin’s concern was about the tendency for leaders and strategists to turn to technical solutions to the problem of population growth in a finite environment:

An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semi-popular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

It is now over forty years since Hardin’s essay was published; however, the themes he explored remain topical. Inevitably faith in a technical fix has turned general public attention to processes such as desalinisation as a method for tapping into the vast stores of sea water. No doubt as desalinisation plants come on-line they will reinforce the existing belief in technical and instrumental reasoning. In order for such issues to be debated more widely, there will need to be a different discourse about these connections. In particular, there will need to be a changed discourse about water as a vital feature of everyday life. In relatively recent times water has become defined, understood and experienced as commercial commodity; the strong sense in which it is a common cultural good is increasingly lost from view. On this score there is an opening to a very different form of cultural politics, including new forms of public education. Water is a common life element. For this reason it is a material property that exists at the very core of sustaining life. On this basis water as a generic topic has the potential for discussions, debates and dialogues across the ever-increasing range of interdependent sub-populations. In short, a new form of ‘water politics’ is needed as a corrective, or alternative, to the ever increasing forces of cultural commodification that act to separate, create difference and stimulate competition and conflict.

Lindsay Fitzclarence

Sure, the departure of Howard had left the Liberal Party bereft of a leader who, unlike Turnbull, could listen to his backbenchers and still take the strong stance, aggressively welding his team together (the success of his wedge politics creating a cast of near-acolytes). But what might have seemed some kind of rudderless chaos for a while after the election was only the beginning of a much larger fracturing. Turnbull has gone down not merely exposing the cracks but forcing the ugly duckling out through them and into the bright light of day.

As the immediate politics of the situation played out, there were in fact few choices. Even though Joe Hockey’s idea of repackaging climate change policy as a matter of conscience seemed to fit the political mood—faith-based policy, policy on the basis of belief, not ‘rationality’ or pragmatism—it was a sign of policy weakness, as well as possibly meaning defeat for the conservative push. With the dandyish Kevin Andrews having warmed up the audience, the ‘hairy-chested’ Howard-man-man Abbott was the true heir apparent. Addicted to getting their way, impassioned about the role of markets yet hunkering down round some notion of a base culture that would provide the ‘values’ by which to live, galvanised, still, around a border politics fuelled by and fuelling fear, the conservatives recognised their man and best bet for market differentiation vis-a-vis Rudd’s moderated neo-liberalism.

Around half the parliamentary Liberal Party now looks to Abbott to aggressively pursue their climate change scepticism, a stance taken seriously nowhere in the world except the fundamentalist Bible Belt of the United States and Australia. What the other half of the Liberal Party will do is not clear. Playing politics around such a basic division, winning the numbers just either side of a fifty-fifty split on ‘matters of belief’ seems impossible for a party needing to set stable policy directions. One can’t see the party being purged of its conservatives by its liberals: the latter aren’t as good at the politics as the party Right; they were, after all, seduced by Howard, losing any moral high ground they might have occupied, and they may no longer have any ‘pull’ in the community anyway around any residual Deakinite individualism which some might wish to resuscitate. Howard and the neo-liberal market effectively trashed that tradition, but also, the electorate may be unable to understand the difference implied by this image of the true liberal or be unlikely to take it seriously as either ethical or very different from the on-the-ground individualism offered by Rudd. Whatever the liberal critique of corporatist forms of government and their suppression of strong individual moralities, which has to be given some credence in history, the guiding concern in the outlook of all the major political currents remains the individual’s relation to the market, and in the present context most people live that as the power they feel when they make an individual consumer choice.

George Monbiot is pretty effectively arguing in the Copenhagen context that the political world will split in future between the ‘restrainers’ and the ‘enlargers’; another death knell for left and right social and terminological divisions hailing from the 19th century. But the question goes also to an understanding of the individual and the nature of the social: why restrain? On what basis might we restrain? What benefits and pleasures might ‘restraining’ bring? It is not ‘just’ a question of possibly saving the planet, but of how and why our ‘humanity’ requires whatever it is the notion ‘restraint’ might be straining to signify. Is it really just ‘restraint’ that we should be aiming for? Certainly its justification should not be mere survival, nor should it signify mere sustainability. Let’s hope it doesn’t suggest a social technology to make us behave better environmentally. Let’s hope, rather, that it involves a better knowledge of ourselves qua human beings: a better knowledge of the relation we need to constitute vis-a-vis the natural world and ‘others’ of all kinds if we are to remain within the bounds of what we define as necessary to our humanity. Unfortunately, ‘restraint’ remains within the orbit of a market-dominated paradigm—where what we must give up is what we might otherwise want, or be called to want. The point is to get to that place where not only do we not want it, but it is no longer a question because a fullness of living and being emanates from elsewhere.

This is to move way too quickly beyond the woes of the Liberal Party, but the enormous gulf represented even in these few paragraphs on the politics of reaction, on the one hand, and a possible opening to something very new, on the other, only underlines the moment we have arrived at. As the small island nations are making clear at Copenhagen, as the demonstrators led by Mary Robinson have been impressing, as the science has been making clear for a long time, fundamental choices are at stake. The Liberals’ conniptions, and ultimately reactionary choice of leader and orientation, point to the significant dangers that accompany periods of social threat, even when the lineaments of change have been evident for decades; even when it has been pointed out many times that it is neo-liberalism and the market under post modern conditions that have sown the seeds of destruction of the very social practices their loudest proponents wish to protect.

Eric Hobsbawn, in Age of Extremes, describes a fundamental shift that took place between the first and second world wars. While the First World War was the first modern war—total and technologised—it was as if no one really understood the powers that fed it. Leaders, and the people, still believed that an end to war would mean a return to what had been before. At war’s end the relative peace of the previous near century, remarkable prosperity and relatively settled social arrangements were what people harked back to; world war was an aberration, never to happen again. Yet radical cultural change had been filtering into pre-consciousness through the prescient art movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just as science and industry were merging in novel ways in the first flowering of the techno-scientific paradigm (the successes of industrial chemistry and the German laboratory system). The period harked back to during the war had already been in flux. Abstract society, predicated upon a new sense of ungroundedness and a culture much less restrained by natural limits, had been felt, sometimes celebrated, certainly artistically and scientifically explored, just as fantasies of stability and rational achievement seemed to promise a return, rather than allow that the conditions of existence had actually shifted under the feet of the classes, bourgeois and working alike.

It would take another twenty years after the First World War, twenty years of preparation for war, worldwide depression, and war against Nazi reaction, for a shift in perspective facing towards the future rather than the past. For Hobsbawn, this ‘post-war consensus’ around Keynesian economics and the welfare state (broadly understood), seems to have been a period of realignment, of system catch-up, so that a more thorough, and perhaps more self-conscious modernity might emerge cognisant of the profound changes not only wrought by war but by the social and technological forces that had shaped it.

Of course, that consensus was exactly what neo-liberalism rose up against later in the century, just as the second surge of techno-scientific success supercharged the economy and produced unheard of material prosperity both in the West and beyond. We also know now that the forces and politics of material abundance, and more recently decadence, depended on environmental conditions and resources that make the ‘necessity’ of modernity and its heirs (‘necessity’ as understood in all the varieties of modernist Progress-based social theory, including Marxism) highly questionable. Taken to the brink by the latest techno-scientific surge, carried in the subject form of the hyper-individuated consumer, on the one hand, and the networked agent, on the other, the world is in fact in a very different circumstance than that described by Hobsbawn as the thirty year 20th-century war period. The need to face up to the conditions both of our humanity and a future no longer dependent on the rape of the earth presents a far greater challenge. But just as Hobsbawn outlines, with considerable delicacy, the commitments and hopes of the different groupings influential at that time, we face a period of system mismatch and cultural misunderstanding, of disorientation as the forces in play work their way through social life, and the possibility of grasping their meaning remains, as always, difficult—only to be realised within a protracted process of transformation.

Standing at the dawn of the 21st century there is no greater concern than the fate of our environment and the Earth community it supports. In response to this there is a growing recognition that our current approach to environmental law is insufficient and, as environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey notes, ‘according to every major environment statistic things are worse now than they were forty years ago’, when the first environmental protection legislation was passed. The reasons why our current system of environmental law is failing are rich and complex. However, I contend that one important reason is inherent to law itself. Indeed, in agreement with Thomas Berry, I contend that human beings have ‘rejected our role as an integral member of the earth community in favour of a radical anthropocentric life attitude’.

Anthropocentrism is defined by Albert Einstein as ‘an optical delusion of human consciousness’ where we come to regard ‘humanity as the centre of existence’. To this definition, I consider anthropocentrism as further encompassing the view that human beings are separate from the planet and all living systems, and the assumption that the universe exists to satisfy the needs and desires of human beings. The division of the world into human beings and nature forms the basis of the modern idea of property law.

Indeed, under Western law, nature is regarded as human property and by definition is a legal object that can be bought, sold, exploited and destroyed to satisfy human preferences. Nature receives its protection through the property rights of human beings, not because they have recognised value or legal rights.

Several problems flow from this framework. To begin, it may not be in a property owner’s economic interest to protect the environment; there might be disagreement over ownership, especially in regard to international waters; and the ecosystem may be unknown or of little recognised (known) value. More fundamental than these practical problems, the status of nature as property creates a fundamental disconnection between humans and the environment and, as David Suzuki notes in his 1999 book The Sacred Balance, this enables us to ‘act on nature, abstract from it, use it, take it apart; we can wreck it, because it is another, it is alien’. Property is the mechanism through which nature becomes vulnerable to human exploitation, further illustrated by Dr Paul Babie in his article ‘Private Property, the Environment and Christianity’ (Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies, 2002):

All resources are allocated or distributed among people according to the private property concept. The earth is dying, therefore, because humankind sees it as private property, capital, valuable only if exploited for economic gain. The domestic legal system of every society that invokes the private property concept uses it as a rationale and justification for an exploitative stance toward the earth’s natural resources.

The perceptions that human beings are disconnected from the environment and that nature exists for human benefit are clearly outdated and harmful ideas. On this point, psychologists James Hillman claims that ‘even to think we are separated from nature is somehow a thinking disorder … You can’t be separated from nature’ (The 11th Hour, 2007) Certainly, modern science is illustrating that human exist as part of a broader ecosystem or web of relationships. Rather than evolving to reflect this knowledge out law remains trapped in a universe that no longer exists and as Cormac Cullinan notes in Wild Law (2002) ‘we continue to govern ourselves on the basis of a discredited understanding of how the universe functions’.

The status of nature as property not only enables human beings to exploit the Earth, it provides a weak framework for environmental protection. Under this framework we are forced to adopt a regulatory approach to environment law. This means that once a company has ticked the appropriate boxes, and so long as they stay within the prescribed legislative boundaries, the activity is acceptable. In response, the great majority of work done by environmental lawyers and the most obvious form of protection offered to communities is to monitor corporate activity and check license applications. In this sense, all environmental laws regulates are environmentalists. They regulate the way environmentalists respond, and this makes us predictable. Further, any resulting legal challenge is tax deductable for the corporation and in many instances money is set aside for this contingency.

This approach is further weakened when companies have ‘indenture acts’ that permit legal override of environmental laws. The most obvious and harmful example of this is the Roxby Downs Indenture Ratification Act 1982 (SA) that exists over BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam lease and overrides the States Environmental Protection, Aboriginal Heritage, Natural Resource Management, Water Resources and Freedom of Information Acts.

In essence a regulatory framework for environmental protection is defensive in nature and is impeding our ability to protect the environment. On the other hand, ‘movements’ are driven by communities, unwilling to accept such a defensive role for themselves and move toward fixing the problems of governance that consistently shove them into that position in the first place. Indeed, people were once treated as property. In response, the abolitionists did not ask for a ‘slave protection agency’— they sought recognition of their rights in law. Securing rights means not fiddling around with regulating how that property can be used. It means changing the very framework of governance that defined those things as property in the first place.

It has been said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. In the past eight years there has been a groundswell of action in this area and communities have been driving rights for nature legislation into law. Some examples include Pennsylvania, where five municipalities (20,000 people) passed ‘rights for nature’ ordinances, saying nature has a right to exist and flourish and giving community standing to advocate the rights of nature. Further, in 2008 the constitution of Ecuador was amended to state that nature has the ‘right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its natural cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution’. To ensure these rights the government is responsible for ‘precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles’.

Berry has coined the term ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ to describe this evolution in law. Earth Jurisprudence refers to legal philosophies developed by humans that are derived from and consistent with the laws of nature. The law of nature is termed the ‘Great Jurisprudence’ and it invites the human community to ‘take its lead from the universe and not from itself when establishing laws’. By understanding and respecting these processes, Earth Jurisprudence supplies the general principles out of which practical laws can be extrapolated. Two important consequences of this the contention that our law should evolve to reflect the inherent value of nature and that human beings are deeply connected and dependant on nature. This shift has the potential to protect our environment and shift our perception of nature in a way that a regulatory approach cannot.

While Earth Jurisprudence is a major field of research and environmental law internationally, very little has been done in this field within Australia. In response, from 16–18th October 2009 Friends of the Earth Adelaide, in partnership with the Conservation Council of South Australia and the University of Adelaide, Faculty of Professions, Research Unit for the Study of Society, Law and Religion (RUSSLR), will be hosting Australia’s first conference on Earth Jurisprudence.

For more information please visit www.adelaide.foe.org.au

Nevertheless, the background concerns about a natural world that can no longer be taken for granted continue to gain momentum. While the significance of empirical evidence is never straightforward, massive transformations in the broader environment, like the dramatic collapse of the Arctic ice-sheets, in place for millions of years, have an immediacy of meaning compelling for many people. Many scientists agree. Similarly, the increasing occurrence of extreme events such as the recent Victorian bushfires are calling into being a new awareness of what the world and Australia may face over coming decades. The likelihood that developments such as these will have significant, if not entirely predictable, consequences for our future world generates deep foreboding. If the global financial collapse disturbs our sense of certainty, climate change now eats away at the grounds of our being.

In 2007 the Rudd Labour government was elected on a platform that contradicted the denialist stand of John Howard. No one could really know at the time what this commitment meant. The term ‘climate change’ does exist as media rhetoric, requiring little substantial understanding of the phenomenon, and we know that Kevin Rudd does know how to manage the media. But even if it were so that a serious understanding of the phenomenon supported the policy shift, this could only ever be a starting point. After all, serious concern can issue in a superficial view that a new mix of policies will quickly restore balance. Isn’t it so that if we focus our intelligence and our technical resources any problem can be managed?

The larger question, usually ignored, has always been how climate change relates to social assumptions. This is not merely a matter of assumptions about energy, as important as they are. The relevant distinction is between processes that can be manipulated through policy responses and those that work at the deeper level of our core assumptions about social life. While there is no doubt that policy is important, it is also limited, especially if it ignores a fundamental change in the conditions of policy formation.

A focus on assumptions that might lead in the direction of destructive climate change must reach down into the cultural assumptions that we feel, but barely ‘know’. Where these assumptions are ignored or merely re-shaped a little within a broad approach to social life that goes unquestioned — the use, say, of solar rather than gas heating, electric rather than oil-fueled cars — climate change is being treated merely as a phenomenon that requires technical change: lifestyle modifications, limited costs and new policies. It will be argued that this approach will be disastrous in a number of ways, especially in seeming to respond to the ‘problem’, easing public anxiety while locking society into a deepening crisis. Even the understandable tendency to turn the debate into a consideration of whether we should aim for 350, 450 or 550 ppm of carbon in the biosphere — a matter that surely must have an answer — easily and usually deflects the debate into a series of technical strategies that leaves untouched the realm of deep-rooted assumptions about our mode of life which it has now become imperative to question. The question of ‘What is to be done’ is pursued within the terms of the society that we have; not only is large-scale social change off the agenda, the type of society that we have is not brought into the foreground.

This absence of social interpretation is a familiar tendency in environmental writing. The question of the social conditions of environmental destruction is hardly ever raised. We must of course be grateful for the insights environmentalists and scientists continue to bring to the climate change question but this does not preclude coming to terms with the limits of current perspectives. The tendency is to concentrate on what is happening in ‘nature’ and not on how social assumptions structure our relations with it. Examples of this treatment of assumptions could easily be multiplied. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse the social only appears in the broad brush-stroke sense of ‘society’ making choices. Because there is nothing distinctive about the social assumptions that lead to the choices; those choices are, implicitly, forms of stupidity or mistakes. In George Monbiot’s Heat, a non-specific notion of ‘society’ is at work in those choices that encourage air travel — a choice that from the standpoint of global emissions is disastrous. But what is the distinctive nature of such a society, why does it so privilege air travel, both taking it for granted and treating it as essential? This level of understanding is typically ignored in environmental perspectives and this absence has the unintended effect of privileging policy and technological solutions over deeper cultural and social institutional solutions. Given the significance of climate change this hiatus predictably will have tragic effects.

Three recent publications illustrate different implications of this tendency to neglect the social world most people too readily take as given. They are Ross Garnaut’s The Garnaut Climate Change Review, David Spratt and Philip Sutton’s Climate Code Red and Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. Anyone who reads these books will learn from them. They contain a diversity of important information and reflect the maturing of empirical research and debate about climate change over the last five years. But they also contain a level of assumption — one deficient in understanding — that they also share. Arguably, such assumptions lie at the heart of barriers to significant action to combat climate change today.

The Garnaut Report is a report to government. It represents an enormous effort that combines an exhaustive compendium of various developments relating to climate change with modelling for different policy possibilities. It is by definition a policy document, addressed to Kevin Rudd and the Labor government in Canberra. It has been widely criticised by environmentalists and others, especially when the Rudd government adopted a minimalist response with respect to the level of emissions reduction by 2020. The basis for this policy was laid at the feet of the Garnaut Report, although it would be unfair to suggest that this is what Garnaut had intended.

Garnaut’s passion is not at issue. The Report shows every sign of being written by a person determined to take the immensity of the climate challenge seriously. It takes up a great variety of developments now discussed in environmental circles and is both informative and well-informed. However, given it is infused with a belief that all the necessary choices can be made through the policy realm and that these will make the difference that matters, it ignores the underlying conditions of policy formation. Hence it collapses into a series of compromises that indicate its broad, unreflective commitment to the contemporary global order. It is structured around a contradiction. All of its policy proposals to tackle climate change occur within the parameters of neo-liberal globalisation. This is a direct consequence of treating climate change as a straight-forward policy issue that assumes that a series of strategies — even radical strategies — will constitute an adequate response. Many people from various standpoints have been highly critical of Garnaut, but no one has really discussed how his given framework, with its focus on policy, shapes what it discusses and proposes.

The problem with Garnaut’s (and with Rudd’s) emission trading scheme (ETS) generally is its central belief: that neo-liberal globalisation is capable of sufficient adjustment to turn climate change around. For Rudd and his many supporters (for example, David McKnight), this is simply another case of the need for government intervention in an instance of market failure, not unlike what is needed to handle the global financial crisis. Rather than accept this view as a rejection of neo-liberalism, it will be argued that this is in fact a massive contradiction: the core institution that is called upon to respond to climate change by sending out appropriate ‘signals’ — the market — is actually the main driver of the climate change crisis. Garnaut’s focus is upon the level of emissions and what policy strategies can be adopted to reduce them and bring them under control. But if the explicit signals to reduce emissions are promulgated by the market, an institution in its present form that calls out by its very structure further consumption of resources and expansive lifestyles, he has settled for a ‘solution’ that will predictably fail. No doubt, some worthwhile changes may be possible, but they will not be the main story. Amazingly, even a crash program to renew power generation via renewable energy has been put aside. This is to be left to ETS modifications to the market, the market as dominant institution being non-negotiable.

In part this can be understood as a consequence of Garnaut’s own contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, he is deeply concerned about and committed to a significant reduction of greenhouse emissions; on the other, he is a significant architect of the global order through his practical advocacy of institutions devoted to global free trade, in turn legitimised by the pursuit of global growth through expansionist trade. In his book Heat, George Monbiot convincingly argues that the growth of global travel is inconsistent with any serious attempt to control emissions. But he fails to come to terms with how this is an implicit critique of the global order itself. And he does not generalise his work on air and shipping travel to the world of trade. But it is able to be generalised and it amounts to a significant critique of the core institutions of the globalisation process.

Trade and travel on varying scales are activities that have been typical of most societies throughout history. However, under conditions of contemporary globalisation, trade and travel take on qualities that do not compare with past circumstances. They become key institutional expressions of a society that has fundamentally changed its structure: a change in balance from social relations that are predominantly local and face to face to a new social principle where relations maintained at a distance better typify its core qualities. Other technological supports to these social relations where the other person is largely unavailable at a face-to-face level — such as computerised communications and the media generally — are also crucial institutional spheres in such societies. But the social institutions associated with trade and travel are perhaps the clearest illustrations of how social assumptions bear on climate change.

There are serious questions about how trade (or travel) can occur on anything like the scale required in a radically globalised society in the future simply because of the growing shortages of fuel needed to sustain it. But quite apart from that, trade — the lifeblood of an order that expands through global exchange — is a symbol of practical activity that feeds global emissions. No doubt many put their faith in the magic of a technological solution, and this can never be entirely ruled out. But it is a hope that resembles past hopes of a perpetual motion machine. In clinging to this hope there is a refusal to consider the proposition that the social assumptions that drive society towards globalisation are core problems leading to destructive climate change.

There are many reasons for questions around social assumptions in destructive climate change being ignored. For a start, the critique of capitalism from a social standpoint has typically addressed social assumptions as set within class relations. Such approaches have never offered much insight into relations with nature and the environment. This is to say that social interpretation, like practical capitalism, has taken relations with nature for granted. Nature is always implicitly ‘there’ to serve social needs. But this attitude is no longer viable. Society not only ravages what is left of nature but, crucially, also treats it as radically malleable — as able to be reconstituted by scientific technique.

The assumptions inherent in neo-liberal thought that bear on nature and the environment are now widely assumed and are not easily put a side. As is all too evident in the work of that key figure of neo-liberal thought, F. A. Hayek, the central tenets of the contemporary order, supported by the market, are rampant individualism and growth. The glorification of expansion — not only of economy, but also population — is a central legitimation of the neo-liberal idea. Supported by a ‘spontaneous’ background structure — the market — and recently supercharged by high technology, neo-liberalism has unleashed a growth machine that consumes and transforms the world around us. While temporarily constrained by a global financial crisis it is, short of a basic and radical challenge, seen to be the only trajectory available to any process of renewal. Rudd’s response to the neo-liberal global financial crisis, to pose government as an indispensible sector in addition to the market, is of little help. It takes on board neo-liberalism’s own self-understanding which poses the choice between market and state as the crucial, defining issue. His ‘radical’ move is to simply seek a ‘balance’. While a role for government in social affairs is not at issue, Rudd’s response lacks insight into the social processes that bring neo-liberalism into being, as well as how it affects social relations. Nor will any technological strategy be capable of challenging this complex of neo-liberal commitments. It is the main social trajectory, and how it is situated within people’s assumptions, which is the question.

In these circumstances, the consequences for the environment of ignoring social assumptions are beyond calculation. There can be no serious response to climate change without a serious response to what counts as development: the endless elaboration of strategies of social expansion that typify what is called globalisation. Climate change as a policy response needs to be displaced by a response that bites more deeply into what we assume and how we act as social beings.

The recent book by David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red, is highly critical of the Garnaut Report as well as Rudd’s policies. It is a much more political book than Garnaut’s could ever be. In fact it is a mixture of argument about the latest developments in climate change and arguments about how to turn climate change perspectives into a handbook for political activism. Like Garnaut, but in a more focused and economical way, it contains many discussions of practical developments in environmental thinking and analysis that a reader can learn from and even be inspired by. It is infused with a sense of desperation about lack of action on climate change, which would be shared by many people knowledgeable about the findings of climate science. But it takes this desperation into territory that, while understandable, is ultimately wrongheaded and even counterproductive.

The organising idea of the book is the concept of the ‘state of emergency’. As I understand it, this idea as related to climate change first came from James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, where he argues that the situation of the world, combining climate change with various other environmental concerns, is such that an emergency in the form of a war economy is justified and necessary. As a way of signifying the seriousness of the state of the world this seemed like a justifiable strategy to focus people’s attention — to jolt them out of normality. Spratt and Sutton take this idea up with zeal, showing how a political emergency could work as a practical response to the challenge of climate change. While Kevin Rudd would certainly disagree with this one-eyed emphasis upon state action because he seeks a balance between state and market, Spratt and Sutton’s proposal shares with Rudd the idea that the proper focus of practical action lies between the institutions of state and the market. This is a consequence, as was argued in relation to Garnaut, of climate change basically being a policy issue that leaves way of life questions unexplored — although the idea of a more powerful state is an important addition in the case of Climate Code Red.

This emphasis has the consequence of turning climate change responses into political strategies of a rather narrow kind. The whole idea of the political emergency has a long history, one which, as in conditions of war, can readily set in place processes that lack empathy for others and respect for democratic rights. It assumes that the process of renewal is largely known and only requires right action. That the crisis may require a more complex consideration of assumed cultural attitudes and social expectations does not really fit the method. It is true that we have an emergency. It does not follow that we need a political emergency. It is true that if our politicians continue to mouth rhetoric and do nothing of any real substance they may call into being a political emergency. But the hard work lies elsewhere.

Climate change must have a politics, but one that captures the distinctive qualities grounded in what we have previously assumed in our relations with nature. Those qualities are cultural, in the sense of deep assumptions leading us on to a variety of (unintended) practical outcomes. To focus on the complex of commitments within neo-liberalism may allow a little more insight into how we have been drawn into a development nightmare, but to do so it is necessary to go beyond neoliberalism’s self-understanding. For it has no insight into how even Hayek’s recommendations have come to have new meanings under the influence of a cultural revolution that has made our globalised world and drawn society down a blind alley or, perhaps more to the point, onto an unsustainable developmental path.

But this unsustainability has a much larger frame of reference than environmental processes. Whether responding to climate change, resource shortages, food shortages, overpopulation or the global financial crisis — the list is near endless — it is essential to come to terms with a new social force in the world. Neo-liberalism captures some of this social complex, but the way society and the market have been transformed over the last twenty-five years requires a deeper understanding than the reference points celebrated by adherents of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal market is actually a ‘hyper-market’ when compared with the one with which Adam Smith was familiar. There would be no globalisation, no global financial revolution, no global financial melt-down, no Margaret Thatcher or John Howard without the social process that has issued in various technologies such as the silicon chip and the communications revolution more generally. This social process is typically treated as though it were a natural phenomenon, simply taken as fact; as just ‘being there’. But to leave it there is to ignore the distinctive qualities of global culture and related social forces.

There will be no comprehensive understanding of the kind of society that has taken shape since the early 1980s without a grasp of the emergent role of intellectual practice that issued in the high-tech revolution. For the first time in history the intellectual practices shaping the high sciences have engendered a practical revolution in core social relations, productive economy and culture that has changed the relation of society to nature fundamentally. This relation is now a more abstract one because high technology supports new forms of relations mediated by technology and thereby the emergence of a radical extension of sociality, an enormous expansion of social relations with little reference to place — the global. Without this radically enhanced sphere largely ‘situated’ in cyberspace, there would be no experiments in global finance and expanded levels of growth. Nor would there be that overwhelming sense of omnipotence vis-à-vis all prior societies that is so typical of global culture. And climate change, while issuing from forces with a longer history, would not be running haywire at nearly the same rate. Nor would science be contemplating projects to respond to climate change that threaten to carry us into a post-human world.

There are two broad responses to climate change apart, that is, from trying to deny it. The first and most common response is to find ways of reducing global emissions. But there is another approach that is now being taken seriously in various circles that arises from a view that the world cannot easily pull back from disaster in coming decades and that to avoid these it will be necessary to geo-engineer Earth.

This possibility is forthrightly discussed in Gwynne Dyer’s Climate Wars. This book too is environmentally well-informed. It constructs scenarios of possible futures for different parts of the world if no serious response to climate change emerges very quickly. Needless to say, the scenarios are grim. If it is thought that we are already experiencing a global refugee crisis, read Dyer’s account of the abandonment of southern Europe by European culture, because lands around the equator have become intolerable under the influence of rising temperatures, and their displacement by desperate peoples from Africa. Or if China seems all-powerful because of recent levels of economic growth, read his account of the decimation of the core productive lands of middle-China within decades, with consequences so dire one feels real reluctance to reproduce them in print. It is a fine line, but perhaps some things are better left to the imagination.

It is the attitude of Dyer towards geo-engineering Earth that I wish to place most emphasis on because it raises key contradictions inherent in the present crisis. Geoengineering is about various practical ways in which science might protect the Earth from the consequences of excessive carbon, for example, projecting large quantities of sulphates into the atmosphere to shade the planet. But the larger point is that the high sciences are now taking on this strategy as a project. The argument in this essay has been that environmental writing should not ignore the social assumptions that lie behind climate change; that social assumptions are major causes of climate change outcomes. In the case of geo-engineering the issues are somewhat different. Here it is a question of how climate change may call out the massive powers of high technology to generate a response to it.

Dyer has come to the conclusion that geo-engineering in one form or another is required for us to survive the next few decades. Here there is considerable agreement with a range of commentators that we do indeed face an emergency. Dyer also shares with Spratt and Hutton the view that society is already engaged in geo-engineering by emitting carbon on a scale that is shaping and transforming the Earth. But this use of the term geo-engineering normalises its meanings, suggesting that unintentional causes and the highly intentional act of bringing planetary-scale high-tech solutions into play are one and the same.

To go down this road of geo-engineering in today’s world requires a shift from climatology to general science or physics. It requires a shift from a practical science that transforms particular matters on Earth in a manner consistent with its conquest, to taking Earth as its object with a view to re-constituting it (as Geoff Sharp argued in ‘There are Limits to the Unexamined Life’, Arena Magazine no. 98). This is the project of the high sciences, one first initiated in the splitting of the atom and the making of the Atomic Bomb. Now the full range of high technologies shape new worlds as a matter of course, while humanity loses touch with its place in the world. The re-constitution of the species, the concern of bio-technology, will be matched by the project of geo-engineering Earth. In both cases the sciences will draw on massive forces never before available to humanity and the dangers of moving into a post-human realm devoid of all familiar reference points presses ever closer. If the fears called into being by climate change point to the end of our taken-for-granted Holocene world, what irony if our social responses ensure that outcome.

The global institutions that make up the neo-liberal world represent one of the choices possible after that fundamental shift that ushered in the world of high technology. This particular choice harnessed high-tech to the world of capitalism and as such opened up the possibilities of a post-capitalist order (in the sense used by Geoff Sharp, Arena Magazine 98) that no longer restricts humanity and the Earth to given limitations. This is a world that can only continue in a post-human form, together with a geo-engineered climate.

A world that accepts the high-tech revolution but also works within the limitations of the species and responds to climate change by preserving the natural world is possible. It could be both diverse and complex and in turn would be constrained by a reflexive knowledge of social assumptions. It will need to be more circumspect than what we associate with radical globalisation, with a greater emphasis on local cultures and modest ways of living. The social and individual excitements of expansionist culture and economy will be displaced by the real and concrete joys (as well as hatreds) of social relations significantly grounded in the face to face. When combined with technologies that are emission-free, the real challenge to climate change will have begun.

The books referred to in this essay are: Ross Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review (Cambridge University Press, Australia, 2008); David Spratt and Philip Hutton, Climate Code Red, The Case for Emergency Action (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008); and Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Scribe, Melbourne, 2008).

But the movement in India has one key distinction, which holds the key to its future. The environmental movements of the rich world emerged after periods of wealth creation and during their period of waste generation. So, they argued for containment of the waste but did not have the ability to argue for the reinvention of the paradigm of waste generation itself. However, the environmental movement in India has grown in the midst of enormous inequity and poverty. In this environmentalism of the relatively poor, the answers to change are intractable and impossible unless the question itself is reinvented.

Just consider the birth and evolution of the green movement. Its inception dates back to the early 1970s with Indira Gandhi’s famous words at the Stockholm conference on environment that ‘poverty is the biggest polluter’. But in this same period the women of the Chipko movement in the Himalaya showed that the poor, in fact, cared about their environment. In 1974, years before the environment became fashionable, the women of this poor, remote village stopped loggers from cutting down their forests. This movement of poor women was not a conservation movement per se, but a movement to demand the rights of local communities to their local resources. The women wanted first rights over the trees, which they said were the basis for their daily survival. Their movement explained to the people of India that it was not poverty but rather extractive and exploitative economies that were the biggest polluters.

This is because in vast parts of rural India, as in vast parts of rural Africa and other regions, poverty is not about a lack of cash, but a lack of access to natural resources. Millions of people live within what can be called a biomass based subsistence economy where the gross nature product is more important than the gross national product. Environmental degradation is not a matter of luxury but a matter of survival. In these cases, development is not possible without environmental management.

In the environmental movement of the very poor there are no quick-fix technological solutions that can be suggested to people who are battling for survival. In this environmentalism there is only one answer: to reduce needs and to increase efficiency for every inch of land needed, every tonne of mineral and every drop of water used. An environmentalism of this kind will demand new arrangements for sharing benefits with local communities so that they are persuaded to part with their resources for common development. It will demand new paths to growth.

I say this because the environmental movement of the relatively rich and affluent is still clearly looking for small answers to big problems. Today, everyone is saying that we can deal with climate change if we adopt measures such as energy efficiency and some new technologies. The message is simple: managing climate change will not hurt lifestyles or economic growth: a win-win situation where we will benefit from green technologies and new business.

Biofuel — growing fuel, not food, on land, to run the cars of the rich — is one such techno-fix. But there has been no discussion of whether biofuels, already competing for land with food crops and raising prices, will reduce emissions when vehicle numbers are increasing. With biofuels under criticism for forcing up food prices and depleting water resources, the next generation technical solution is on the cards — hybrid cars. I am not against biofuels or hybrid cars. But these are only small parts of the big change we need. The transition to a low-carbon economy is not just about technology but also about redistributing economic and ecological space. This change will hurt, as indeed climate change itself already has, with variable weather events destroying crops and hurting the most vulnerable and powerless.

Re-learning Knowledge: Water

It is also clear that these new answers will lie in learning the frugality and rationality practised by poorer societies. It will require us to re-learn certain technologies.

Take water management. For many countries of the South, water insecurity, which on the one hand leads to declining agricultural productivity and on the other to waterborne disease and death, has become the biggest limiting factor for growth. Today, water management is the starting point for getting rid of poverty in the world. Water security is the starting point for food security.

Countries of the water-stressed South need a new paradigm for water management. This will demand a realisation that water and culture go together and that water shortage is not about mere failure of rain. It is about the failure of society to live and share its water endowment. But to get our water practice right, we will first have to deal with the poverty of the professional mind, which has over time become fossilised and rigid in its outlook. We actually need a movement for water literacy to build a new understanding based on past traditions and the wisdom of our people who learnt to survive and indeed make the best use of their environment.

Take the fascinating case of ancient Rome and Edo (the ancient Japanese city on which modern Tokyo is built). The Romans built huge aqueducts that ran for miles to bring water to their settlements. These aqueducts even today are the most omnipresent symbols of that society’s water management. And many experts have praised the Romans for the meticulousness with which they planned their water supply systems.

But, no, these aqueducts represent not the intelligence but the utter environmental mismanagement of the great Romans. Rome was built on the river Tiber. The city did not need an aqueduct. But as the waste of Rome was discharged directly into the Tiber, the river was polluted and water had to be brought from long distances away. Water outlets were few as a result and the elite appropriated these using a system of slaves. By contrast, the inhabitants of Edo never discharged their waste into the rivers. Instead they composted the waste and then used it in the fields. Because they used the common and shared rivers, Edo had numerous water outlets and a much more egalitarian water supply.

Dying Wisdom: Building New Practices

Ancient Indians understood the speed with which water, the world’s most fluid substance, disappears. They understood that the mathematics of water is simple: if you harvest just 100 mm of rainfall on just 1 ha of land, you receive as much as 1 million litres of water. But on the other hand, if you don’t capture this rainfall the wettest place on Earth will have water shortages.

Research published by the Centre for Science and Environment in the mid-1990s showed that countries like India need to learn from their traditional community based water management systems so that they can build ways to the future. In today’s India it is imperative that groundwater be recharged so that the rate of extraction is not greater than the rate of water infiltration. The traditional water systems were designed to ensure that rainwater was stored in millions of disaggregated and diverse structures, which in turn led to local recharge of water into the ground. It is such distributed water harvesting that will build water security.

In other words, India must rework the paradigm of water management so that it is designed to harvest and augment local water resources so as to lead to local and distributed wealth generation. It is also clear that local and distributed water infrastructure will require new forms of institutional management, as water bureaucracies will find it difficult to manage such vast and disparate systems.

These ideas have captured the imagination of policy planners in the country. It is now well established that water management strategies will need to devolve power to local communities so that they can build structures for local water conservation and practise its use for efficiency and equity. This alternative practice and policy research has all converged into policies to build local water structures under employment guarantee schemes, where the state guarantees the right of employment to the poor. Employment is used to build water conservation structures so that drought relief can become relief against drought.

The Great Water Leapfrog

The problem becomes more intractable as India progresses — as it moves from using water in traditional sectors like agriculture to industries and urban areas. India is considered a traditional water economy that has to make the transition to a modern water economy. In other words, the water sector has to become part of the formalised economy, with formal institutions and mechanisms for its management and pricing.

The point to understand is what this modern, formal water economy means in the rest of the world and what it will mean for countries like India. In the industrialised world, industry and urban households use over 70 per cent of the water resources, while agriculture gets the remaining 30 per cent. In traditional water economies like India the reverse is true: agriculture consumes over 70 per cent and industry and urban areas the rest.

The fact is that urban areas and industrial centres in countries like India are now putting greater pressure on water resources. Cities across the country need more water for their growing populations and, more importantly, their growing affluence. Growing demand leads to pressure to source water from further and further away. The capital city of Delhi will get water from the Tehri dam, over 300 km away in the Himalaya. The software capitals of Hyderabad and Bangalore respectively will receive water from the Nagarjunasagar dam on the Krishna river 105 km away and the Cauvery, about 100 km away. The desert city of Udaipur used to draw its water from the magnificent Jaisamand Lake, but it is drying up and so the city is desperately seeking a way out of its new thirst.

The problem for the ‘informal’ water economy of rural India is that its agriculture-dependent population still exists. The economy has not transformed into a manufacturing or service sector economy. The water crisis is about the management of these competing needs — the vast rural economies, which need water for their food and livelihood security, and the newer growth economies of modern, industrial India. This water competition is leading to low-intensity conflicts between different users. For instance, when the southern city of Chennai wanted to source its drinking water from the Veeranam Lake some distance from the city, farmers agitated against it. When the Gujarat city of Rajkot needed water, farmers drew fire and were killed. In 2005, in two separate incidents in Rajasthan, farmers were killed as they rioted against water withdrawal from their neighbouring reservoir and canal for distant cities. It is for these reasons that the cities and the industries of rich India must begin to pay for the water they use. But pricing and markets will not suffice. It is equally imperative that water management paradigms and their technologies be reinvented for this poor–rich world.

On the one hand, the rich cities of the poor world will have to first invest in efficiency, so that they do not become water wasteful, then learn the science and art of efficiency. On the other hand, they will have to invest in managing and treating their waste water. Today, cities extract from cleaner upstream sources and discharge sewage and industrial effluents downstream, which in turn leads to increased problems of polluted water and ill-health for poorer users of the rivers. The capital intensity of the modern sewage system — its transportation and eventual treatment before disposal — is such that it cannot be afforded by all users, or even all urban areas. The question then is how will India’s modern cities grow without creating water waste and pollution? How will these cities innovate so that they can practise recycling and reuse even before their counterparts in the industrial world? The challenge is to re-invent the most modern waste management system that reuses every drop of water discharged, at a cost that can be afforded by all.

A country like India has to leapfrog over the modern economic paradigm, to create its own — hybrid — version of the water future. Modern water policy will have to be built on the premise that scarcity is not about the lack of resources but about being wise about their use.

Defining the Challenge of Economic Growth

Years before India became independent, Mahatma Gandhi was asked a simple question: would he like free India to be as ‘developed’ as the country of its colonial masters, Britain? ‘No,’ said Gandhi, stunning his interrogator, who argued that Britain was the model to emulate. He replied: ‘If it took Britain the rape of half the world to be where it is, how many worlds would India need?’

Gandhi’s wisdom confronts us today. Now that India and China are threatening to join the league of the rich, the environmental hysteria over their growth should make us think. Think not just about the impact of these populated nations on the resources of our planet but, again, indeed all over again, of the economic paradigm of growth that has led to much less populated worlds pillaging and degrading the resources of Earth.

Let us be clear. The Western model of growth that India and China wish most feverishly to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources and generates enormous waste. The industrialised world has learnt to mitigate the adverse impacts of wealth generation by investing huge amounts of money. But the industrialised world has never succeeded in containing those impacts: it remains many steps behind the problems it creates.

Take the example of local air pollution control in the cities of the rich world. Postwar economic growth saw these cities struggling to contain pollution. The growing environmentalism of citizens led to investment in new technologies for vehicles and fuel. By the mid-1980s the indicators of pollution, measured then by the amount of suspended air particulates, led us to believe the cities were clean. But by the early 1990s the science of measurement had progressed. Scientists confirmed the problem was not particulates as a whole, but those that were tiny and respirable, capable of penetrating the lungs and the circulatory system. The key cause of these tiny toxins was diesel fuel used in automobiles. So vehicle and fuel technology innovated. It reduced sulfur in diesel and found ways of trapping the particulates in vehicles. It believed new-generation technology had overcome the challenge.

But this is not the case. Now Western scientists are discovering that as emission-fuel technologies reduce the mass of particles, the size of the particles reduces and the number emitted goes up, not down. The particles are even smaller. Called nanoparticles (measured in the scale of a nanometer, one billionth of a metre), these particles are not only difficult to measure but, say scientists, could be even more deadly since they easily penetrate human skin. Worse, even as technology has reduced particulates, the trade-off has been to increase emissions of equally toxic oxides of nitrogen from these vehicles.

The icing on the cake is a hard fact: the industrialised world may have cleaned up its cities, but its emissions have put the entire world’s climatic system at risk and made millions living at the margins of survival even more vulnerable and poor because of climate change. In other words, the West not only continues to chase the problems it creates, it also externalises the problems of growth onto others, those less fortunate and less able to deal with its excesses.

It is this model of growth the poor world now wishes to adopt. And why not? The world has not shown any other way that can work. In fact, it preaches to us that business is profitable only when it searches for new solutions to old problems. It tells us its way of wealth creation is progress and it tells us that its way of life is nonnegotiable.

But I believe the poor world must do better. The South — India, China, and all their neighbours — has no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory. When the industrialised world went through its intensive growth period its per capita income was much higher than the South’s today. The price of oil was much lower, which meant growth was cheaper. Now the South is adopting the same model: highly capital-intensive and so socially divisive; material and energy-intensive and so polluting. But the South does not have the capacity to make investments critical to equity and sustainability. It cannot temper the adverse impacts of growth. This is deadly.

Let’s stay with the challenge of air pollution. Some years ago, the organisation I work with argued that the city of Delhi should convert its public transport system to compressed natural gas. The move to gas would give us a technology jumpstart as it would drastically cut particulate emissions. Delhi today has the world’s largest fleet of buses and other commercial transport vehicles running on gas. The result is that the city has stabilised its pollution in spite of the huge number of vehicles, poor technology, and even poorer regulatory systems. In other words, Delhi did not take a technology-incremental pathway of pollution control on the basis of fitting after-treatment devices to cars and cleaning up fuel. It leapfrogged in terms of technology and growth.

Equity Provides the Basis for Change

This is the challenge that we in India are discussing and finding ways to solve. We know that our cities are on a different developmental trajectory: people still catch buses and cycle or walk to work. In Delhi, for instance, even now 60 per cent of people use buses, which occupy less than 7 per cent of the road space, while cars, which crowd over 75 per cent of the roads, transport only 20 per cent of the people. Our cities can and must develop an alternative vision for growth.

The question is can they leapfrog from cities with few cars to cities with few cars? Can they build their mobility plans based on a mix of swanky buses, trams, bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways? In other words, can they do everything today that the modern cities of the old-rich world — from Berlin to Vancouver — want to do tomorrow?

For instance, in Delhi, policy makers are now working towards creating a new mobility model. It includes the building of a rapid transit bus system on a 15 km road in the heart of Delhi. This system creates a central lane for buses to drive along without obstruction, dividing the remaining road space between cars (two or three lanes), bicycles and pedestrians. The project is built on the premise that road space must be equitably allocated to the various road users. It is also investing in a metro and augmenting its bus system.

Climate Change: Equity is a Pre-requisite

For the past sixteen years (the first intergovernmental negotiation took place in Washington DC in early 1991) the world has been haggling about what it knows but does not want to accept. It has been desperately seeking every excuse not to act, even as science has confirmed and reconfirmed the fact that climate change is real — that it is related to carbon dioxide and other emissions, and that emissions are related to economic growth and wealth. In other words, it is human made and it can devastate the world as we know it.

The fact is that science is not just certain but ‘unequivocal’ that climate change and its devastation are now inevitable. But along with trying to understand the science, we must begin to put a human face to the climate change that is beginning all around us. We must see climate change in the faces of the millions who have lost their homes in the Sidr and Nargis cyclones that ripped through Bangladesh and Myanmar. We need to see climate change in the faces of those who lost everything in the floods caused by intense rainfall events. We need to know that the thousands of people who died in these events did so because the rich have failed to contain emissions necessary for their growth.

Energy is the Key

The world’s need for energy — to run everything from factories to cars — is the cause of climate pain. The fact is also that after years of talk no country has been able to de-link its growth from the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. No country has shown how to build a low carbon economy. No country has yet been able to re-invent its pathway to growth. This then is the challenge. After years of talk, the proportion of new renewable energy — wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels — comprises just about 1 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply.

What is tragic is that the world is hiding behind the poverty of its people to fudge its climate maths. The renewable sector is made up of the biomass combustion — the firewood, cowdung or leaves and twigs used by the desperately poor in our world to cook their food and to light their homes. It is this that is providing the world its space to breathe.

What, then, is the way ahead?

Firstly we must accept that the rich world must reduce emissions drastically. Let there be no disagreements or excuses on this matter. There is a stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, built up over centuries in the process of creating Western nations’ wealth. It is a natural debt. This has already made climate unstable. Poorer nations will now add to this stock through their drive for economic growth. But that is not an excuse for the rich world not to take on deep, binding emission reduction targets. The principle has to be they must reduce so that we can grow.

The second part of this agreement is that poor and emerging rich countries need to grow. Their engagement with any emissions targets will not be legally binding but based on national targets and programs. The question is how to find low-carbon growth strategies for emerging countries without compromising their right to develop.

This can be done. It is clear that countries like India and China provide the world with the opportunity to ‘avoid’ additional emissions. The reason is that we are still in the process of building our energy, transport or industrial infrastructures. We can make investments in leapfrog technologies so that we can avoid pollution. In other words, we can build our cities on public transport; our energy security on local and distributed systems, from biofuels to renewables; our industries using the most energy- and so pollution-efficient technologies. We know it is in our interest not to first pollute then clean up; or first to be inefficient, then save energy.

As yet, the rich world has found small answers to existing problems. It wants to keep its coal power plants (even as it points fingers at China and India). It wants to build new coal power plants. It believes it can keep polluting and keep fixing. This time, the answer it has hit upon is carbon capture and storage — to pipe the emissions underground and hope the problem will just go away. In this way it can have its cake and eat it too.

It also wants to keep its cars and add more. Or drive more. It can do this by simply growing fuel and pumping it into vehicles. It does not matter if this biofuel is a small blip in the total consumption of oil — all the corn in the United States can only meet 12 per cent of current US petrol use. It does not matter if it there is not enough land to grow food and fuel in the world. The cynics will say, after all, the corporations rule the oil and the food business. Scarcity will only increase their business. But the realists should say the ‘illusion’ of solutions is the opiate of the rich. This way they do nothing but can create an illusion of action.

The New Deal

If we know that the emerging world can leapfrog to make the transition to cleaner technology, the question is why is this not happening? Why is it that the world talks big but gives small change?

When the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated, the world decided to invent the clean development mechanism (CDM) to pay for the transition in the poorer world. But the mechanism was designed to fail. The obsession was to get the cheapest emission reduction options for the rich world. As a result the price of CERs — the certified emission reduction unit used in this transaction — has never reflected the cost of renewable and other high technology options. It is a cheap and increasingly corrupt development mechanism. It is also a convoluted development mechanism, in which rules bind governments not to think of big change. In fact, current CDM provides disincentives for governments in the South to drive policies for clean energy or production. Any policy, which is already designed for good is bad in the CDM portfolio. It will not qualify for funding.

The world must realise the bitter truth. Equity is a prerequisite for an effective climate agreement. The fact is that without co-operation this global agreement will not work. It is for this reason that the world must seriously consider the concept of equal per capita emission entitlements so that the rich reduce and the poor do not go beyond their climate quota.

Rights Based Agenda

In 1990, the Washington based World Resources Institute (WRI) published its report showing that annual greenhouse gas emissions of the developing world almost equalled those of the industrialised world and that in fact the emissions of the developing world would overtake the industrialised world’s emissions in the near future. However, the critique of the report by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) found that the methodology used by the WRI to compute the responsibility of each nation favoured the polluter.

Under the WRI methodology each nation was assigned a share of the Earth’s ecological sink, but the assignment was proportional to the nation’s contribution to the Earth’s emissions. The sinks are natural systems, like oceans and forests, which absorb emissions. Global warming is caused because emissions exceed this natural capacity of the Earth to clean pollutants. The WRI had estimated that the world produced 31,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 255 million tonnes of methane every year. It then estimated that the sinks of the Earth naturally assimilated 17,500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 212 million tonnes of methane annually. On this basis it then computed a ‘net’ emission of each nation by allocating a share of the sinks to each nation, based on its gross emissions contribution.

The CSE argued that there were two main types of sinks where carbon dioxide is reabsorbed by the biosphere: the oceans and terrestrial sinks. While terrestrial sinks, such as forests and grasslands, may be considered national property, oceanic sinks belong to humankind. They can be regarded as common global property. The CSE then apportioned the sinks of the basis of a country’s share in the world’s population, arguing that each individual in the world had the entitlement to the global commons. This allocation, based on individual rights to Earth’s natural cleansing capacity, changed the computation of the nation’s responsibility drastically. For instance, under the WRI methodology the United States contributed 17 per cent of the net emissions of the world, while CSE methodology computed that it actually contributed roughly 27.4 per cent of the net annual emissions. Similarly, China’s contribution decreased from the WRI estimated 6.4 per cent of the net annual emissions to 0.57 per cent and India’s decreased from 3.9 per cent to just 0.013 per cent.

This allocation of Earth’s global sinks to each nation, based on its population, created a system of per capita emission entitlements which, taken together, were the ‘permissible’ level of emission for each country. This, according to CSE, would create a framework for trading between nations, as any country that exceeded its annual quota of carbon dioxide could trade with those countries with ‘permissible’ emissions. This would create financial incentives for countries to keep their emissions as low as possible and to invest in zero-carbon trajectories.

We have also argued that, as much as the world needs to design a system of equity between nations, nations of the world need to design a system of equity within the nation. It is not the rich in India who emit less than their share of the global quota. It is the poor in India, who do not have access to energy, who provide us with the breathing space. India, for instance, had per capita carbon emissions of 1.5 tonnes per year in 2005. Yet this figure hides huge disparities. The urban-industrial sector is energy-intensive and wasteful, while the rural subsistence sector is energy poor and frugal. Currently it is estimated that only 31 per cent of rural households use electricity. Connecting all of India’s villages to grid-based electricity will be expensive and difficult. It is here that the option of leapfrogging to off-grid solutions based on renewable energy technologies becomes most economically viable. If India’s entitlements were assigned on an equal per capita basis, so that the country’s richer citizens had to pay the poor for excess energy use, this would provide both the resources and the incentives for current low-energy users to adopt zero-emission technologies. In this way, too, a rights based framework would stimulate powerful demand for investments in new renewable energy technologies.

This rights based agenda is critical to the resolution of the climate change challenge. The fact is that climate change teaches us more than anything else that the world is one; if the rich world pumped in excessive quantities of carbon dioxide yesterday, the emerging rich world will do today. It also tells that the only way to build controls will be to ensure that there is fairness and equity in the agreement, so that this, the biggest co-operative enterprise, is possible.

Strengthening Global Democracy

In conclusion, there is no doubt we live in an increasingly insecure world. Indeed, the state of insecurity in the world is made more deliberate, more wilful, because of the intentional and unintentional actions of nation-states and governments in the name of development and global justice. So, if the rich world is increasingly paranoid about its defence from the failed, bankrupt and despotic states of the developing world, the poor are insecure because they are increasingly marginalised and made destitute by the policies of the rich. The challenge of climate change is adding a new level of insecurity for the world’s people. It is also equally clear that the business-as-usual paradigm of growth will lead the world towards a vortex of insecure people, communities and nations.

It is here that the countries of the South face even greater challenges. They will need to rebuild security by rebuilding local food, water and livelihood security in all villages and cities of their world. And in doing this they will have to reinvent the capital- and material-intensive growth paradigm of the industrialised North, which deepens the divide between the rich and the poor. They will have to do things differently in their own backyards. But, more importantly, these countries will have to become the voice of the voiceless, so that they can demand changes in the rules of globalisation in the interest of all.

Sustainable development needs to be understood as a function of deepened democracy. Sustainable development is not about technology but about a political framework, which will devolve power and give people — the victims of environmental degradation — rights over natural resources. The involvement of local communities in environmental management is a prerequisite for sustainable development.

The South’s quest for an alternative growth strategy will have two essential pre-requisites. Firstly, a high order of democracy, so that the poor, the marginalised and environmental victims can demand change. It is essential to understand that the most important driver of environmental change in these countries is not government, laws, regulation, funds or technology per se. It is the ability of its people to ‘work’ democracy.

But democracy is much more than words in a Constitution. It requires careful nurturing so that the media and the judiciary, and all other organs of governance, can decide in the public and not private (corporate) interest. Quite simply, this environmentalism of the poor will need more credible public institutions, not less.

Secondly, change will demand knowledge: new and inventive thinking. This ability to think differently needs confidence to break through a historical ‘whitewash’, the arrogance of old, established, ultimately borrowed ideas. A break-through — a mental leapfrog — is what the South lacks the most. The most adverse impact of the current industrial growth model is that it has turned the planners of the South into cabbages — believing it has no answers, that it has only problems, for which solutions lie in the tried and tested answers of the rich world.

It is also important that this environmentalism of the poor, building bottom up, based on principles of equity and human need, must influence the world. It is essential if the world has to combat climate change that it learns from these movements about the need to share resources so that we can all tread lightly on Earth.

Sunita Narain is director of the Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi. This article is an edited extract from her 2008 K. R. Narayanan Oration titled ‘Why the Environment Needs Equity: Learning from the Environmentalism of the Poor to Build our Common Future’, presented at the Australian National University. Ms Narain’s visit to Australia was supported by the Australia–India Council.

This may seem unfair in relation to climate change. Rudd has set in place a developmental process focusing on significant goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and processes of emission control. But even in relation to climate change it has developed a policy that amounts to nothing more than an administrative tool. Formed in the campaign to defeat Howard, and influenced by opinion polls that in no way reflect the reality of the on-the-ground costs of responding to climate change, it attends to the global threat as merely an aspect of normal governance.

The political effort is to normalise climate change: both in terms of policy and in the minds of voters. Whether our way of life might contribute to climate change, and what might count as a serious response at this level of thinking and action is marginalised because administration looks after an assumed way of life. The Garnaut Report is already being placed in cotton wool. Garnaut has made it clear that his investigations require responses more radical than ever before contemplated. Rudd now responds that Garnaut will merely be one of the sources government will consider.

The Limits of the Administered State

But what if the responses required go far beyond normal administration? The current debate on oil pricing is perhaps a guide as to how this will be handled.

All of the main elements of the oil price crisis have been coming to the surface for years. The four elements are: background problems associated with producing a finite resource (recent reports argue that in 2007 oil exports actually fell); destabilisation of states and regions that produce oil, usually caused by Western pressures and assumptions; the rise of developing states and their rapidly expanding consumption needs; and profligate consumption by the West to satisfy grossly excessive ways of living and producing. The only new aspect – a fifth element affecting prices – is speculation; but rather than march speculators around in handcuffs we should ask what else could be expected given the first four fundamentals of this volatile situation. Rather than begin a process of debate and education that addresses these elements forthrightly as fundamental questions about life expectations, the Rudd government settles for an utterly limp set of childish proposals: a fair market price scheme; a threat to pull OPEC into line by means of the blow-torch, and contradictory appeals to OPEC to consider our car drivers.

Administrative strategies that suggest all is well, except for a few hiccups, are matched in other areas of government. The neo-assimilationist assumptions of the Northern Territory intervention into Aboriginal communities, instigated by John Howard, retain a surprising degree of appeal for the Rudd administration. It seems to fit its general approach to political affairs. In this view sexual abuse, the distribution of pornography and drugs, individual health and problems of everyday life are matters calling for good administration. They certainly call out a ‘moral’ reaction, often populist and lazy, but administration remains the answer – an attempt to go beyond Left and Right, in the limited sense of bi-partisan strategy. The intervention appears to be gaining momentum and may even be generalised outside of Indigenous issues, once again encouraged by newspaper campaigns. If children are not being properly cared for or, more generally, if there appears to be a moral hazard (as the market economists would call it), government must intervene. Will this prove the claim that the Northern Territory intervention is not racist?

At first glance these new interventions seem similar to previous forms of welfare (the Leviathan state concerned for its citizens), but there is a new momentum at work, one certainly not uncovered by any newspaper campaign.

The administrative approach to climate change, to the politics of oil and to interventions in the remnants of communal life have two things in common: they all are ‘beyond Left and Right’; they all take contemporary society and its way of life for granted. We don’t have to refer to the ‘good old times’ of a familiar capitalism to recognise that economy and society have been fundamentally transformed. The old adage that capitalism always changes allows us to avoid the reality that neo-liberal globalisation is not simply ‘capitalism’; and that this emergent form brings with it problems never before faced by human communities. In particular, the high technologies amplify and transform aspects of life once protected from the market. Today, inflated expectations of the self, even the denial that there is a self, the new role of the university, the assault upon nature, the market in its global form, the possibilities of techno-embodiment, the infinite wants of the consumer, all appear to confirm that the possibilities are limitless. High-tech processes amplify our world and draw us away from any notion that it might be finite.

In respect of families, and what Rudd has begun to call ‘little children’, we can see the effects of high-technologies in the thinning out of the social fabric. The multi-faceted media that accompany the globalisation of social life radically undermine community-based and generation-based settings. Relatively rich face-to-face local and neighbourhood social relations are thinned out and displaced by technological mediums, putting in their place conditions that underpin both moral panics and interventions. These moral panics do not simply arise out of media campaigns. They have a basis in the new social order now administered in the name of a politics beyond Left and Right.

Ignoring these processes of social transformation allows the question of how we should live also to be avoided. Gradually new circumstances of life have been set in place that undermine community settings. Problems of community and family can then be taken up simply as empirical realities needing an administrative response. The same can be said for the problem of oil prices as well as climate change. But taken simply as an empirical fact, the anger in the community about oil pricing can have only one ‘rational’ outcome: growing conflict potentially leading to neo-imperial ‘adventures’. Indeed new sites of international conflict could be said to be the only likely outcome unless the fundamental issues can be properly addressed.

To treat oil pricing as an empirical or technical problem ignores how neo-liberal globalisation affects the felt needs of individuals. As it breaks apart the social world of local communities and sets them in motion as global social connections without limit, excessive consumption demands are naturalised. Crucially, finite oil symbolises to us how neo-liberal globalisation demands a world of infinite need and striving, one embodied in global trade and ever-expanding demands on global transport, a world that will never be satisfied. And what can be said about oil can be multiplied many times over in relation to climate change. Market-based emission schemes seek to protect and conceal the society they implicitly support. They seek to shift production into more acceptable directions while preserving the world of economic growth and global free trade, the very world that will eternally call into being excessive demand and must itself be restructured.

Neo-liberal globalisation is now encountering a world that it believes should not exist: the finite world. The strategy of turning all problems into administrative problems conceals from view the need to reconstruct societies across the board by re-invigorating regionalised production and distribution, as well as regional communities. Rudd is fond of claiming that we must face the costs of emission controls now rather than later. But it is the many questions implicit in this more basic restructuring that has to be addressed, now.

John Hinkson is an Arena publications editor.

For the past two hundred years we have been blindly building our own asteroid. It is called climate change. Since 1990, despite increasing knowledge of the consequences, we have been adding to its size at a frenzied pace. Launched at Earth, there is no chance it will miss us without equally frantic activity to avert it. If it hits with full force, the consequences for life on this planet are likely to be as profound as those following earlier collisions. To date, we have failed to grasp the risk posed by our own asteroid.

What Climate Science is Telling us Now

Scientists increasingly believe that global warming of 2oC above pre-industrial levels significantly increases the chance of ‘dangerous’ climate change, during which abrupt and dramatic shifts in climate may occur, with catastrophic social, ecological and economic consequences (Schnellnhuber et al. 2006). So what should we aim for — in terms of cutting emissions, and stabilising the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases?

Recent modelling exercises suggest that, with atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 ppm CO2 equivalent (CO2-e), we will have between a 25 per cent chance and an 80 per cent chance of global average warming exceeding 2oC above pre-industrial levels (Figure 1). Here’s the first bit of bad news. We are roughly at that point now – at around 450 ppm CO2 equivalent.

Figure 1

We are adding, globally, around 2.5 ppm (CO2 -e) each year and, with industrialisation in China and India proceeding apace, the rate of accumulation has increased over the past decade. Now the second bit of bad news. Without substantial and rapid cuts to global emissions, we will not only ‘overshoot’ 450ppm CO2e but remain well above this level for a long time, given the time greenhouse gases remain in the air.

And here’s the third bit of bad news. The risks and levels of extinction increase as global greenhouse gas levels – and temperatures – rise. Rapid warming beyond 2oC is unacceptable for ecosystems and many species. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report indicates that approximately 20 per cent to 30 per cent of land-based plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction by 2100 as global mean temperatures exceed a warming of 2oC to 3oC (Fischlin et al. 2007: 213), and up to 50 per cent of species (Stern 2006:57) once temperatures rise well beyond 3oC. Moreover, ecosystems and species appear at increased risk not only because of warming, but because of the increased range, frequency, intensity and duration of climatic extremes and extreme events (storms, fires, floods, etc).

However a globally averaged notion of ‘dangerous climate change’ has little meaning for those regions, ecosystems and species sensitive to even slight temperature increases – including low-lying coasts and islands, coral reefs, alpine systems, and the polar caps. Up to 80 per cent of biota in some regions face an increasingly high risk of extinction by 2100 as global mean temperatures exceed a warming of 2oC to 3oC (Fischlin et al. 2007: 213).

How does Australia fare? Preston and Jones (2006) provide a succinct summary of Australian studies which suggest that even 2oC is too high for certain Australian ecosystems and species (Table 1). Warming of 1-1.5oC will lead to significant losses of core habitat for endemic plant, reptile, bird and animal species (and likely extinctions) in Queensland’s Wet Tropics; frequent bleaching episodes on the Great Barrier Reef, and substantial losses and extinctions among its endemic coral and fish species; and a further loss of between 13 per cent and 27 per cent of flow in the Murray Darling even by 2030. The higher we go, the worse it gets.

Table 1: Projected impacts to Australian ecosystems

In addition, most climate studies only report on the relatively ‘immediate’ impacts of global warming – up to 2100. This diminishes consideration of the catastrophic medium to longer term impacts of even ‘modest’ global warming. Current atmospheric concentrations of GH gases may lead to the permanent loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic within five years – a loss that even three years ago (see, for instance, Steffen 2006: 23) was not expected to occur until the end of this century. However current levels also will cause the loss, over the next 200-1000 years, of much or all of Greenland’s ice cover, leading to increases in sea level of some 7 metres, consequent loss of highly valued cultural and natural coastal sites, and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

These changes will also greatly enhance the ice-albedo feedback effect and accelerate autonomous global warming. Hansen et al (2007) argue that global warming must be confined to 1oC to avert the permanent loss of the planet’s major ice sheets. In addition, Hansen et al (2008) argue that the doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric GHG concentrations (560ppm CO2), while leading to 3oC warming or more by 2100, will result in much higher stabilised global temperatures of around 6 oC once long-term feedbacks are taken into consideration.

In other words, the notion of ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ climate change really depends on where you are, who you are, what you are, and when you are live. If you are Tuvaluan, at 2oC your island will have been inundated and your links to country and culture irreversibly destroyed. By the time we hit 2oC, we will have lost most of the Great Barrier Reef and threatened a wide range of Australian species with extinction. If you run diving tours on the Great Barrier Reef, or farm in the Murray-Darling Basin, 2oC is not safe for your enterprise or lifestyle. ‘Dangerous’ climate change for Australia starts well before 2oC. This understanding must condition our thinking about global and local emissions targets that Australia champions, locally and in international negotiations.

Thinking about Targets

For the last decade and a half, Australian debate about climate change has been captured by a narrow discourse. It was framed in 1996 by John Howard as defining the ‘the national interest’. This discourse has reduced the key questions for consideration to: ‘How much will it cost?’ (defined in narrow economic terms and immediate changes to GDP) and ‘How will it affect us NOW?’ (defined in terms of present dollar impacts). The thought that has dominated the Australian climate debate – even since the Stern Report – has been: ‘What is the least we have to do to change our lifestyles and disrupt the economy in order to protect our existing individual or corporate interests?’

Yet the emissions targets we choose should depend on answering two different and prior questions. First, what will we accept as ‘safe’ for our planet, and our continent, and our immediate lives – what do we want to pass on to our children and future generations? And second, what are the likely risks and ecological and social consequences of adopting particular targets?

Having defined what we want, and with an understanding of the risks and consequences of different targets, we are then in a position to determine which target we will support. It is this understanding of desires, risks and consequences that is still lacking in the present debate.

We are yet to have public discussion about the purpose of targets, about what our collective goals should be – and what we are prepared to lose. If we decide that we want to avoid a high risk of species extinction, and the associated degradation or loss of economic and social systems, we will choose tough targets. In this sense, even severe emissions cuts can be ‘economically achievable’. While the immediate adjustments will be somewhere between hard to harsh, the longer term costs will be proportionately easier to bear. By contrast, trying for a ‘soft landing’ in the short term will certainly lead to a crash landing in the longer term, and permanent hardship for us, and most other surviving species. In Australia, the informed and accepting response to urban water regulations during the present (and continuing) water ‘crisis’ shows we are not so much unwilling to take tough self-limiting actions as ignorant of the consequences of government climate policy and our own inaction.

There is also a second line of argument we need to consider. The issue is NOT (simply) which targets we choose but the emissions reduction pathways or trajectories we adopt. As Stern recently noted, ‘it is the stock of atmospheric GHGs, measured in terms of atmospheric concentrations, that causes the rise in global temperatures and changes in climate’ (Stern 2008: 9; emphasis added). We should be as – indeed perhaps more – worried about the increase in the stocks of atmospheric greenhouse gases than targets per se, given their long and damaging life once released into the air. The deeper, earlier and faster the cuts in emissions, the less the damaging stock of excess greenhouse gases will linger over time.

Climate Risk, Politics and Policy

If I were to announce that I was prepared to burn my house down, with my partner and child and all our possessions inside, depending on the result of a toss of a coin – heads I light the match, tails I don’t – I would probably be regarded as a dangerous gambler and a certifiably insane pyromaniac. Yet, puzzlingly, this is practically the approach of most climate policy makers and negotiators to the risks of ‘dangerous’ climate change.

We eagerly insure our houses against a much slighter chance of theft or fire or accident. Planes and nuclear reactors are designed to a very high level of mechanical safety (around 1:100,000 years for the latter) because of concerns about the risk of catastrophic failure. Most industrialised countries – including Australia – fund substantial health and defence expenditure on the basis of deterrence and risk minimisation. Yet in the realm of climate change politicians and policy makers appear prepared to accept a much higher level of possibility of catastrophic failure.

The latest IPCC report estimates that emissions reduction of between -25 per cent and -40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 by developed nations (Table 2), and reductions of between -80 and -95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, will lead to stabilised atmospheric concentrations of around 450ppm CO2 -e and warming of 2.0-2.4oC. As noted earlier, this would still leave between a 25 per cent and an 80 per cent chance of exceeding 2oC.

Table 2: IPCC WG3 Rpt (2007) – Emissions allowances and concentration levels

The IPCC infers that to stay below global warming of 2oC requires developed countries to cut their emissions by more than 40 per cent by 2020. However, it is highly likely that the IPCC has underestimated the chance of tipping points emerging at lower than this temperature and has failed to consider long-term feedback effects that would take warming to higher levels. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) does not include modelled estimates of the impacts of recent gross increases in industrial emissions, or scientific publications from late 2006 onwards. Each of these factors makes the IPCC (4AR) targets conservative. Reductions of risk, and of warming outcomes, require tougher targets that those outlined by the IPCC.

We improve our chances of keeping global mean temperature below 2oC only by ensuring atmospheric GHG concentrations return rapidly to below 400 ppm CO2e (around or below 350ppm CO2). At 400 ppm CO2e, we have a 66 per cent and a 90 per cent chance of remaining below that 2oC global warming threshold (Meinshausen 2006b:3).

Labor’s Climate Policy and its Implications

During the last election, Labor campaigned hard on climate change and clearly differentiated itself from the Coalition in its willingness to rejoin the global community by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, and by articulating a long-term emissions reduction target for Australia. There is a public expectation that Labor will do all it can to solve the problem. The Rudd Government currently supports proposed emissions cuts by developed (Annex 1) countries of between -25 per cent and -40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020, as agreed at in Bali last year. It has also enshrined in Labor policy an Australian national emissions reduction target of -60 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050. Labor has not yet adopted a short-term emissions target. This will be determined when caps are set for the national emissions trading scheme. There has been loose public discussion of an interim target of between 13-15 per cent by 2020 (Warren 2008).

Article 2 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) calls for

stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

Given what long-term targets as weak as -60 per cent by 2050 would deliver if taken up by all Annex 1 (industrialised countries), it seems clear that Labor currently supports a domestic climate policy that leads, de facto, to the destruction or profound damage to many of our continent’s iconic ecosystems and species. This is in breach of Article 2 of the UNFCCC, and also of commitments under the World Heritage Convention, the Biodiversity Convention, the RAMSAR Convention, and a number of other more specific international treaties and associated domestic legislation requiring Australia to do all it can to protect listed sites (including the Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay, Fraser Island, the wet tropics of Queensland, and Kakadu National Park) and listed endangered species.

Meanwhile, Article 3.1 of the Convention states that Parties ‘should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof’. In signing and ratifying the UNFCCC, developed countries like Australia also accept the need for an additional emissions reduction burden that reflects their disproportionate historical contribution to the global warming problem. This is reflected in the IPCC’s view that Annex 1 countries should aim to cut emissions by between -80 per cent and -95 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Equal per capita emission rights, distributed internationally using some version of a contract and converge scenario, offer the most equitable formula for the distribution of future emissions capacity. For Australia to accept an internationally equitable emissions quota using such a formula, Australia’s current per capita emissions of around 26 tonnes of CO2 will need to be reduced to a global average of approximately 1.5 tonnes per person (based on estimated global population of 9 billion by 2050). In other words, our reductions must be higher – between -90 per cent and -95 per cent below 1990 levels – for a globally equitable distribution of per capita emissions rights to occur. It seems clear, then, that Labor, with its -60 per cent by 2050 target, may also have breached Article 3.1 of the UNFCCC, by supporting inequitable global climate outcomes.

Deflecting that Rock

The emissions targets that Australia adopts nationally, and champions internationally, must reflect what we as Australians choose as the risk of unacceptable – or ‘dangerous’ – climate change. These targets should be, to recapture and recycle John Howard’s infamously misused term, what we regard as being ‘in the national [ecological] interest’. This is not the case at present for Australian climate policy, where chasms exist between what scientists are telling us about the chances of dangerous and abrupt climate change, what policy makers and politicians support as viable targets and outcomes, and what most people understand these targets will deliver. The public has not been given the chance to consider its options and to choose what it regards as a ‘safe’ level of climate risk. And so, in the meantime, we continue to build that asteroid.

Labor now has to choose between being a climate leader or a climate laggard. Leadership is the right stance if we believe in ‘first mover economic advantages’ and, critically, in minimising climate risk. Only international agreement among developed countries to ensure deep, rapid and early cuts to greenhouse emissions – beginning with a reduction of over -40 per cent by 2020, the national target Germany adopted last year – will begin to deflect our own asteroid. To help move negotiations to that point, Labor must first adopt such targets at home and then champion them overseas, for safety’s sake, if we are to deflect that rock hurtling towards us.

Peter Christoff teaches climate policy at the University of Melbourne and is Vice President of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

References

Fischlin, A. et al. (2007) ‘Ecosystems: their properties, goods and services’, in IPCC WG (Working Group) II (2007) Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Hansen, J. et a.l (2007) Atmos. Chem. Phys. Vol 7. 2287.

Hansen, J. et a.l (2008) ‘Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?’, submitted to Science, April 2008 (http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126)

Meinshausen, M. (2006a) ‘What does a 20C target Mean for Greenhouse Gas Concentrations? A Brief Analysis Based on Multi-Gas Emission Pathways and several Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty Estimates’, in Schnellnhuber, J.S. et al (eds) Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Meinshausen, M. (2006b) ‘< 20C Trajectories – a Brief Background Note’, Kyoto Plus Papers (Berlin, Boll Stiftung/Wuppertaler Institut/ WWF/ European Climate Forum).

Preston, B.L. and Jones, R.N. (2006) Climate Change Impacts on Australia and the Benefits of Early Action to Reduce Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions. A consultancy report for the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change February (CSIRO).

Schnellnhuber, J.S. et al (eds) Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change (2006: Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Stern, N. (2006) The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press).

Stern, N. (2008) Key Elements of a Global Deal on Climate Change (London: London School of Economics and Politics).

What good is a song? There is a commonsense idea, perhaps part of the identification of the musician as social outsider, that popular musical forms are natural languages of social opposition. Rob Hirst, of Midnight Oil, when accepting his group’s installation in the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2006, lamented that there was almost no ‘complaint rock’ being heard in Australia, excepting the voice of neo-roots hippie John Butler.

Two recent issues of CD compilations from anti-conservative lobby groups suggest that politically inspired and politically interpreted popular music is still being produced. These CDs display a range of genres, the associations of which are at least as important as overt content in constructing the political stance of these releases. Genre creates the space in which musicians perform, a place for the construction of a persona, of heightened communication, as well as a language of recognised and conventional sounds, the locus through which audiences identify with a music.

Much of modern Western political song derives from the sounds and ideologies of radical populist folk. This was first developed by The Almanac Singers in the early 1940s, committed east coast radicals coming out of the American Popular Front left-wing. When singers of this group, like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others found a way to turn agit-prop in a down home direction, they set in process new relationships between performer and audience that would culminate in the modern folk protest song and the committed folksinger. With this musical figure came a style of performance where informality was the guarantee of authenticity. The individual voice or the small performance collective were the ideal producers of a type of social realist document.

This might today be another relic of left-wing art if not for what grew from it. In the 1950s McCarthyism failed to suppress the possibilities of the new city-folk music, and as college kids played their guitars and banjos they gradually turned the form of protest songs into a confessional, individualised expression. Simon Frith argues that in the 1960s rock used the categories of value it took from the folk movement to differentiate itself from pop. So, as folk rock turned into the new serious rock of the counterculture, it carried its folk authenticity with it. But authenticity had morphed from socialist realist truth to material reality into the performer’s truth to self. Hip hop and punk are easy to read within the master narrative of folk’s authenticity. It seems a long way from ‘Which side are you on?’ to P. J. Harvey, but the trail between is clear enough to trace.

The two CDs reviewed here mobilise some of these genres and their histories.

The first, Stand up and Shout, is a collection assembled from performers from around the Australian folk movement; these are clearly the heirs of the old political folk movement. The second is a compilation drawn from a different range of musical styles and scenes — from the independent music scenes and songwriters from electronica to hard rock.

Stand up and Shout is released by GetUp, a web-based and community political action lobby group formed by oppositional forces in dismay at the re-election of the Howard Government in 2004. It campaigns for ‘economic fairness, social justice and environment’. The CD is distributed by Rouseabout records and assembled by Warren Fahey, long established entrepreneur, activist and performer in the Australian folk movement and founder of the centrally important Larrikin Music.

The Australian folk movement, in which this material is situated, despite its relatively small recording sales is a self-confident social movement, the core of which is in the hugely popular folk festivals such as those of Woodford in Queensland, and Port Fairy in Victoria. In this scene, singer-songwriters like those on this CD share festival stages with world music performers, jazz performers, folkloric cultural ensembles and independent rock artists with localist orientations.

The styles and genres on this CD are, even by folk movement standards, fairly conservative. The performers come across as powerful individual voices, and there is little apparent post-production on the tracks. Characteristic folk styles abound, such as finger-picking guitar, and some singers favour the idiosyncratic combination of accent and projection that characterises the influence of the British folk revival in Australia. There are a few references to Australian country music. One singer adopts the general vocal approach of hyper-nationalist John Williamson in a number which joins footy club humour with political debunking. Mike Maclellan, a polished and experienced performer contributes a paean to Australians’ groundedness in the outback, adopting, probably unconsciously, the tune of Eric Bogle’s anti-war song ‘No Man’s Land’ (aka ‘The Green fields of France’), made famous by both the Pogues and Slim Dusty.

Some contributing artists fit themselves into historical traditions of song performing, casting themselves back nostalgically to past imagined working-class communities. Danny Spooner sings ‘Bring out the Banners’, written by John Warner, a rousing anthem to the glory days of unions as social communities and set to the tune of a powerful Methodist hymn. The a cappella and community choir movement which has grown throughout Australia since the 1990s is manifest on several other items on the disc. Numerous trade union choirs have formed within this movement, aiming to resuscitate a style of worker’s political culture from an earlier era. They combine a deep-seated wish to musically enact political conviction with nostalgia for simpler days of class struggle.

The other double CD set, Turning the Tide — Voices for a Living Planet, like the first, is issued by a coalition of environmental activist groups, assembling recordings of up to thirty contributing artists. It proclaims its stance for renewable energy and rejection of nuclear solutions, and supports the rights of traditional Indigenous owners whose lands are within the sights of the nuclear industry. Supported by a lively website and MySpace page, it invites engagement with the music tracks and artists, and provides the background discourses within which the music can be heard and interpreted.

The contributors include popular indie and roots artists like Missy Higgins, Mia Dyson and John Butler, as well as performers from jazz, improvisation and techno dance backgrounds. These music tracks are interspersed with recordings of Aboriginal elders and custodial owners of lands threatened by uranium mining and the voices of survivors of the brutal Maralinga nuclear tests.

Many of the tracks have little overt political content. Missy Higgins candidly says of her contribution, ‘to be honest [the song] has nothing to do with climate change. I want to support the cause … that I feel strongly about’. The political statements of the CD are seldom contained in lyrics. They are situated in the play of sounds and genres which carry rich, if allusive references to musical histories, affinities and allegiances.

Thus the compilation deliberately progresses from one genre to another. For example, the second CD in this set starts with conventionally structured songs from roots performers, then moves to performers influenced by Dub — vocal rapping over a bass-heavy reggae-based accompaniment — such as Irish Maori Sydney-sider Declan Kelly. From there it moves to more energetic didjeridu-fuelled dance tracks from Indigenous performer Tjurpurra. For extended political statements rap delivery is favoured, whether as the dominant style of the track or as an interlude cut and pasted into other genre formats. Australian hip hop has been strongly politicised by its popularity with Aboriginal and other outsider groups, and by the cultural politics of the hyper-Australian voices of Oz hip hop. Against all these styles, most rock genres based in guitar bands are positioned as conservative, and their inclusion here has the air of historic quotation. Rob Hirst, drummer and key songwriter of Midnight Oil, contributes a track, and the Oils’ Beds are Burning is given a cover, as is the Triffids’ Wide Open Road. In a mode which seems to oscillate between homage and irony, several other tracks quote psychedelic rock sounds, even to the extent of a now quaintly exotic solo sitar break.

However, the abstracted, technologised forms of dance and techno-based music, which are well represented here, have been the most powerful musical languages for the new anti-globalism and environmental movements. From the 1990s, these genres have provided the sound track for raves, which have for many of their participants been a new performance metaphor for utopian social community. In Australia the bush doof is a localised form. These are independently organised dance events in public rural and bush spaces where transitory and culturally autonomous communities are called into existence, incorporating spontaneous organisation, carnivalesque performance, display and spectacle such as fire events and, of course, psychotropic substances. As Graham St John points out in his Free NGR: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor, they are post-national in politics, and combine ecological consciousness, radical new ageism, fundamental urges to Indigenous reconciliation, and a new utopian compact between humans and the planet.

Yet do these formations go beyond what St John calls ‘lifestyle anarchism’?

Their music is a nostalgia for the future, just as the heirs of the Left in the folk movement cast their wistful eyes backwards. Both of these CDs evoke ideal political communities. Neither provides the means to create them, but that is what we need politics for.

Graeme Smith teaches in Ethnomusicology at Monash University.

No society can ignore the basics of material production, and for all ‘modernised’ economies the system of production is in crisis if access to oil cannot be secured. Oil has long been a strategic matter. But the politics of oil changes forever when availability begins to reflect restrictions of a more profound type: those arising out of the finiteness of the resource itself. Such restrictions are matters of fact to be established, but they are also in the eye of the beholder. There are now many beholders: political leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, George Bush and Dick Cheney, who while publicly saying little, nevertheless believe and act as though policy must now reflect the likelihood of finite availability. Whether restricted supply based in finite resources is actually upon us right now is not the main point. Rather it is that society and politicians believe that it is about to be. With this changed expectation global politics moves into completely uncharted territory.

Any reflections on the oil crisis need to begin with how this new acceptance of a finite resource has emerged. For this revolution in thinking turns most of the assumptions of the growth society on their head, at a time when the growth society is largely taken for granted as the only way to live. There are now quite a few books that explore the contemporary situation of oil as a finite energy resource. In this essay many of the statistics and empirically based conclusions have been drawn from David Strahan’s The Last Oil Shock, published in 2007 by John Murray.

Apart from difficulties in securing supply in the early decades of the twentieth century, the first inkling that there might be a crisis related to a finite resource emerged in the provocative writing of Marion King Hubbert in the 1950s and 60s. An oil geologist, and something of a maverick, he is responsible for the idea of peak oil. This theory, which initially focused on the continental United States, demonstrates via various techniques that the production of oil in any given territory proceeds through stages of growth and then decline. It is grounded in an assumption that geological oil is finite, being generated by known processes of organic transformation over millions of years and found in definite geological structures. While the techniques of discovery and recovery vary, and some are more successful than others, Hubbert used practically grounded mathematical techniques to make his argument. He showed that the Bell Curve was an appropriate tool to predict the life of a given oil province once it was subject to serious exploitation. His most famous victory came when he counter-intuitively predicted in the 1960s the 1970 peak of oil production for continental United States. This prediction was made at a time when production was rising and in the face of universal scepticism.

The United States was something of a special case in that its potential had been thoroughly explored over many years. The likelihood of a sudden shift in the success rate of exploratory wells was unlikely. In other words, exploration was on such a continuous scale that it could be said to have achieved a definite pattern. All the subsequent attempts to turn around the decline in successful wells, especially the decline in the size of fields, have failed. Even the new offshore fields, which seemed — like the earlier enormous fields opened up in Alaska — to hold the possibility of countering Hubbert’s predictions, have only allowed oil producers to avoid a serious plummet in production. In the United States, oil production has been falling since 1970.

Generalising from the US case was not a straight-forward matter because oil exploration was more uneven in the various regions of the world. Relatively unexplored regions can suddenly leap in their potential with the discovery of a single large field. However, over the last twenty years a pattern has also developed as the search for oil worldwide has been promoted. The case of North Sea oil is illustrative of a broad pattern.
North Sea oil played a crucial political role in the earlier oil crisis of the 1970s. The West regarded OPEC as a threat because it held most of the oil cards and was able to control pricing. The emergence of significant suppliers who were not members of OPEC was a condition for managing a serious situation. The new fields associated with North Sea, being outside of the ambit of OPEC, helped lift the confidence of the West that there was plenty of oil to go round and that pricing would not be managed by nations hostile to its interests. However, North Sea oil has also gone through its cycle of development and decline, such that by 2005 it had fallen 30 per cent below its peak in 1999.

This decline phase is a general tendency, with an exception or two, all around the world. The rate of worldwide oil discovery has been falling since 1965. Today the rate of discovery is merely one-sixth of the peak rate, while the world consumes three barrels for every one that is found. Many of the leading producers of the past are in a decline of roughly 3 per cent per year. And a question mark even hangs over the secretive production records of the largest producers, like Saudi Arabia. Strahan is convincing that there is good reason to think that the world peak is upon us — at a time when demand is growing at 2 per cent per annum. If the peak is ten years away it will not make a lot of difference.

It does not take much imagination to see what a falling rate of production of 3 per cent might mean when demand is growing at 2 per cent. The supply gap will open at a remarkable pace. The market will respond initially — higher prices will dampen demand while encouraging supply — but it is clear that restrictions based on finite oil resources will limit the efficacy of a market response after a few years. The market, via higher prices, does work with peak oil for a period because oil production that has peaked does not instantaneously convert into zero production. Rather, it plateaus and then falls, one hopes gently. And pricing can reduce demand for oil up to a point. But as we will see, for a critical commodity like oil it can only be a matter of time before such reductions impact upon the very nature of development in the West.

An account of the reasons why oil is now increasingly accepted as a finite resource, soon fatefully to move into production decline, is one thing. The real world of politics as nations, economies and cultures come to terms with what oil as a finite resource means will be a more complex story, one that will entail an enormous upheaval of policy and infrastructure, as well as cultural hope and perspective. While the end of the Age of Oil will entail events and stresses that will be profound in their consequences, it will be a positive development in the mid to long term if it brings the world to its senses.

Of course, it should not be forgotten that the discovery that oil is a finite resource intersects with a longer term crisis also of the most serious kind: climate change. The consumption of oil (and coal) is the major contributor to CO2 emissions. But before any simple conclusions are drawn that the solution is to substitute one type of energy for another less damaging one, it is important to see that the situation is much more complex than is first apparent. Coming to terms with what a declining supply might mean, we must remember that oil and coal are sources of concentrated energy that have no comparison. One gallon of petrol contains the equivalent energy of three weeks of manual labour, and oil is more flexible than coal, especially for transport. It is not difficult to see why oil has become so important for capitalist economic development.

The relationship between oil and economic growth is one key for understanding the rise of the growth society that is now taken for granted as the only way to live. There has been quite suggestive economic research, reported by Strahan, that points to energy being the forgotten factor in assessing the reasons for the explosive economic growth of the last half-century. This contradicts, or more likely qualifies, the conventional view that has credited new technologies with this outcome. If this view is confirmed, it does have serious implications. Replacing dense energy like oil with renewable energies will never be able to support the levels of growth of the last fifty years because renewable energy is too diffuse. And while this is hardly an argument against renewable energy, for it is central to any prospect of containing the furies that are now set free in climate change, it does give some insight into the massive changes that lie ahead. It is true that this is unavoidable anyhow if the world is to respond to climate change. But the demise of oil forces this transformation upon us in the short to medium term.

The multiple ways in which our social world and economy have become wed to dense energy sources, especially oil, is barely realised. Energy, especially oil, has shaped how we think of ourselves as consumers seeking global lifestyles. It has allowed us to think about markets and trade in ways that have never been available to any other society, and soon will no longer be available. It has been part of a developmental core that has allowed society to go out on an unsustainable evolutionary limb. It follows that the end of the Age of Oil will be the end of much more than oil. This will be much more than a serious economic crisis. It will take on new meanings as a cultural crisis that reaches into every aspect of how we assume we should live.

It is arguably the fate of globalised society to come to terms with the finiteness of oil, and it is here that the all-encompassing ways in which oil has penetrated life in globalised society that is striking. The number of commodities that are dependent upon oil is stunning. There are the obvious ones such as the great range of plastics, TVs and computers, cable sheathing, CDs and DVDs, carpets, seals, food colouring, asphalt … the list is near endless. The pillage of oil for six decades has led to an array of commodities that will be seriously pressured once the peak has passed. They make up many of the commodity items that today are regarded as essential.

This dependence on oil specifically, however, is not absolute. The scientific processes that allowed derivatives from oil to be made into varied commodities could be replicated using other organic materials. Oil is only organic material (treated by nature over millions of years). This is evidenced in the growing trend in the Western economies to redirect agriculture towards the production of bio-mass, in part to produce substitutes for oil that will allow the continued use of automobiles, but also in order to produce other commodities like plastics. In Indonesia, for example, Western investment is being used to cut down forests and grow palm oil for the same reason. It is a strategy that is gaining momentum. So alternatives to oil are possible, at least in principle. But there is a catch, and this is very much a sign of our times. The shift to an interest in bio-mass is likely to quickly turn into utter disaster.

As Strahan and others have pointed out, this re-direction of agriculture is going to distort resources away from the production of food at a time of unprecedented demands for food. Just to produce the plastics used in the United States would require 40 per cent of US maize production. And if all of the agricultural land in the United States was put to producing fuel through bio-mass, it would only manage to cover one-quarter of current consumption. Oil is a concentrated resource by virtue of its long gestation. The attempt to replace it with a few quick fixes only serves to illustrate the assumption of high-tech culture that finite resources are constraints that may be readily brushed aside.

But it is not only the obvious commodities that are under pressure. Quite unlikely and crucial ones are indirectly affected, like the capacity to produce food employing high-yield agriculture. Here nitrogen fertiliser comes under the spotlight. Strahan makes some telling points about the crucial contribution of nitrogen in disproving the predictions made by Malthus over a century ago, that rising population (that expands exponentially) will outstrip the capacity of agriculture to feed it, because agricultural growth is necessarily arithmetic. A crucial element, nitrogen, made possible the continued improvement in yields that have fed rapidly growing populations throughout the twentieth century. It is nitrogen that has allowed the doubling of yields in China, and even greater growth in yields in the United States. While abundant in the atmosphere, nitrogen is mostly made available by a scientific process that relies on the hydrogen in natural gas.

While the world has more natural gas than oil, this is only relative. There is good reason to think that the future of natural gas will follow closely that of oil, and it is predictable that the cost of nitrogen fertilisers will soar before too long. Benign attitudes towards population growth, triumphant celebrations of agricultural growth, in turn framed by the growth society, have led the world to the brink of a population disaster that was otherwise avoidable.

Finally, and crucially, there is the issue of transportation and globalisation. Here there is much at stake. On the one hand, there is the whole question of trade and prosperity. Trade is regarded by economists, politicians and much of the public as the key to wealth and prosperity. Trade has been important through much of human history, but the scale of overseas trade relative to the local economy under the globalisation of the last two decades is comparable with nothing from the past. Not only industrial goods and services enter this process of exchange. So too does food — even basic vegetables — enter the circuits of global exchange. This has many implications for society, but the concern here are the implications of this reliance on oil. As the levels of traded goods today grow as never before, the consumption of oil escalates. It takes no Einstein to see that, quite apart from the damaging effect of trade on climate change, this is a ‘prosperity’ we cannot have for much longer. It is doubtful that the world could turn to nuclear ships for purposes of trade. Solar ships do not seem likely, and the age of wind-powered ships is well passed. Perhaps there could be a return to coal-fired ships, or some derivative of coal, but this would be an even greater disaster for climate change and the environment generally. Even if twenty years down the track geo-sequestration were to be proven viable, no one has proposed it for ships at sea. It is clear that an era is now on the wane.
And even if there was a revival of coal-fired ships for purposes of trade, this would not help in the least with respect to the question of air travel. George Monbiot in Heat showed that air travel has no way of reducing its rapidly expanding carbon emissions because there is no substitute energy available. But, at least for the foreseeable future, there can be no significant air travel if there is no oil. This is a basic challenge to the lifestyle of global travel and tourism, core institutions of high-tech globalisation.

It is an irony that finite oil has helped form a society that seeks to put behind it all forms of finite limitation. In the West the second half of the twentieth century is noted as being a period of rapid economic growth and cultural change, culminating from the 1980s onwards in the phenomenon of globalisation. The main interpretation of how this change came about credits the new technologies for structuring and shaping the computer on the one hand and bio-technology on the other. By and large these technologies have reconstructed industry on a vast scale, making possible the rise of internationalised media communications, as well as the emergence of global economy, finance and global trade. They have been thought of simply as ‘technologies’.

But reference to technologies is deceptive because these high technologies are a new kind of technology, emanating from universities and research institutes. They are technologies that carry the new insights of highly generalised social relations of inquiry, the high-tech sciences. Because of the new capacities of the high sciences to see nature from a more generalised standpoint as bytes of information, high-tech industry has enormous power at its disposal. As such high-tech makes possible forms of development, based in the deconstruction of all ‘natures’, that hold out the prospect of transcending all versions of a finite world. Nonetheless this promethean drive towards a world without particularity or limits still encounters barriers that defy that broad impulse.

Many have been caught up in naive enthusiasms for this possibility of ‘emancipation’ from the finiteness of our biology (for this tendency, see Geoff Sharp’s ‘From Here to Eternity’ in Arena Magazine nos. 88 and 89). There are other limits too, that continue to constrain globalisation. While high-tech society offers to transcend manual labour by resorting to automation, the desire to engage in a cooperative and tangible work process remains important to people. If globalisation offers the world of the global celebrity the temporary excitements of fleeting identity, the desire to live in local and regional communities that represent a finite and knowable social world engages the ethical desire of many people. Very major limits arise from the finiteness of planet Earth and its self-maintaining systems. And, as has been argued, globalisation is constrained by oil as a finite resource.

There is little doubt that the globalised high-tech world seeks to transcend the limitations of oil. In this regard high-tech globalisation mimics the transcendence at the core of all technological utopias. In relation to energy, the promise of unlimited power in nuclear technologies is a powerful symbol that attracts many in scientific and political circles. From their view the high-tech society can, in principle, go beyond its early dependence on a finite resource and move to another level of development. But by and large nuclear power is failing because it is unable to be domesticated. It generates deep fear because, set against the beauty and glory of planet earth, nuclear energy is a wild and unpredictable power, it is a step beyond the capacity of human beings to control their creations, its wastes degrading the habitats it interacts with, and its potential for calamitous wars ever present. It encounters an increasingly universal resistance from ordinary people. And, ironically, there is good reason to believe that its source in uranium is also finite (see Alan Roberts’ ‘Nuclear Power: The Phantom Solution’ in Arena Journal no. 23). Nuclear dependence is a blind alley hidden by the implicit hopes for transcendence that inform our commitments to high-tech globalisation.

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Two immovable forces within globalisation now face each other in an unfolding drama one would normally associate with a disaster movie: finite oil and the forces of global expansion. The forces associated with globalised society are extremely powerful. On the one hand, there is the force of actual developmental processes, which rely upon objective social structures such as high-tech strategies and global capital, that tend to sweep away all that stands in their path. On the other, there is the force of taken for granted belief systems that mean we have forgotten that other ways of living are possible. But, if it is a truism that something will have to give, it is not likely to be finite oil.

It will take a very substantial wrench for the world to take seriously that, apart from broader forms of communication, the prospect for the global way of life is no longer viable. People simply do not believe that our economies could be so unrealistic or our cultures so oriented towards fantasy. Nor do they believe that society could have such weak, if not criminal, leadership. They do not understand that global cultures systematically screen from view alternative pathways and present contemporary reality as the only reality. The distinction between oil as a strategic problem and oil as a finite resource escapes them. The search is on for a knight in shining armour to save the world from these finite frustrations. Whether it takes the form of nuclear energy or solar energy, by and large people’s desire for ‘solutions’ at the present time carries the assumption that, somehow, global expansion will continue.

This is a miscalculation on a scale incomparable with any other modern world crisis. The holy grail of world trade, the basis of neo-liberal growth and prosperity, is completely dependent on a resource that is not only finite but moving into decline. The era of globalisation seems destined to be relatively short-lived.

This leaves only one question: how to revivify local and regional cultures and economies on a modest scale and reduce our expectations of a life based in consumption — in other words, to build towards a society no longer fixated on economic growth or global trade. There is much to gain from such a re-orientation. While contemporary political institutions are unable to respond, once ethically oriented people see a way forward and channel vital energies into the restructuring of cultures, much can be achieved.

John Hinkson is an Arena Publications editor.