According to Californian professor and Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond, the reason the Maya civilisation failed is because the elites lived in walled cities, insulated from the environmental degradation which led to their eventual demise. He sees a similar problem in the Western world today with elites living in gated communities, standing aloof from the rest of their society and the world.
But are these privileged ghettoes the problem? Is it an issue that our elites don’t see the environmental problems that exist? Or perhaps, is it that they see problems that don’t exist?
When Diamond visited Australia earlier this year to promote his new book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive he told an audience of about 850 people - including government ministers, journalists, business executives and myself - at Brisbane’s Performing Arts Complex that we should phase out agriculture altogether in Australia. The professor was frequently clapped and cheered during his hour-long address.
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I understand the message and mood were similar at the Sydney Writers Festival where Diamond spoke at two closing ceremonies (two because the first was sold out) and in Melbourne were he gave the Deakin Lecture, replayed on ABC Radio National’s Science Show.
An entire chapter in the book is devoted to Australia with the prognosis that the Australian environment is generally unproductive and has been irreversibly damaged by European farming, forestry and fisheries practices.
Diamond states that we import most of our food. This may be the perception, but the reality is we export much more than we import. Last financial year Australia exported (pdf file 625KB) fish, meat, grain and so on, worth $22 billion and imported food and beverage to a value of $6 billion.
He also says Australian farmers are inefficient and in Australia we need to cultivate more land to produce the same quantity of food as our overseas competitors. The reality, however, is that Australian agriculture is highly productive (pdf file 109KB) with some commodities achieving double the world average on a tonnes per hectare basis, including for rice and cotton.
Wheat is one of the few crops with a yield well below the world average. This reflects the economics of wheat growing in Australia. Wheat in Australia is not irrigated and inputs are low with better land used to grow higher value crops - we have a low yield by design and for good ecological and commercial reasons.
Diamond suggests Australian agriculture is on the verge of collapse, yet we had a record wheat harvest just two years ago. The bottom-line is that yields continue to increase for most crops and with the adoption of minimum tillage the impact of farming on the environment continues to decrease.
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Diamond writes that Australians are cutting down too many trees and as a consequence Australia’s forests will disappear “long before our coal and iron reserves”. He states that wood chip from Tasmanian forests is being sold to Japan for $7 per tonne. Check the statistics at the government’s Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (pdf file 870KB) and you will find that in December 2004 a total volume of 1,413,300 tonnes of wood chip was exported to Japan at a value of $214,147,000 which gives a price for wood chip of $152 per tonne.
His chapter on Australia is full of errors. By ignoring the evidence and suggesting there is everywhere a crisis, Diamond spreads misinformation and makes it difficult to identify the real environmental issues that need to be addressed. How could he get so much, so wrong?
Diamond seems to have gleaned much of his information from environmental organisations and their policy documents which are notoriously misleading. For example, during the last federal election Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Wilderness Society didn't only campaign to close down the Tasmanian forest industry. Their joint efforts (pdf file 500KB) also included a “Save the Murray” campaign, by taking water from irrigators. They claimed, “The once mighty Murray River is dying. On current trends, Adelaide’s drinking water from the Murray River will be too salty to drink two days out of five by 2020”.
Jennifer Marohasy reviews in more detail Jared Diamond's chapter on Australia in Australia's Environment Undergoing Renewal, Not Collapse here.
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