Damage control - a greater problem than climate change

“Climate change” has become a happy hunting ground to divert us from the greater problem which subsumes it - damage control. The world is becoming almost irretrievably damaged in almost every direction. Meanwhile people focus on arguing about climate change, and governments focus on carbon trading, an expedient which will profit some and allow the biggest carbon villains to continue emitting, while the destruction of problematic “offsets” like forests is temporarily delayed.

To realise this is to try to do something about it. This is not a doom-wallowing article.

The causes of global damage include the effects of warming, whether it is an escalating climate trend or not, and whether humans contribute to it or not. Observing the heat over cities, the sparkling world of lights seen from space, the billions of cars and power plants spewing away more heat, it is difficult to believe that these efforts of mankind have no effects on the atmosphere. All these can be reduced without diminishing quality of life - and indeed, in many ways will improve it.

The causes of global damage include the effects of pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - as well as thousands of other pollutants. Whether these cause climate change or not, these do cause acid rain and a range of human illnesses, from mental retardation caused by lead, to possibly the strange increases in asthmatic disorders.

Some global damage is attributed, at least in part, to warmer seas but also to human activity that sends effluents into seas where corals are dying, and over-fishing and trawling the bottoms off the oceans diminish the fish stocks on which whole populations depend.

The New Scientist is a curious magazine today - almost three-way split between relatively esoteric enthusiasm about space and physics, partly sparked by hopes there may be escape to other planets; then amazing inventions and projects; but thirdly, almost every week, it reports more damage inflicted upon the world. One week, it is about flora and fauna changing habitat because of global warming - retreating to once cooler regions, or having migration problems because landing places can no longer support them. Another week, glaciers and snows are disappearing, threatening the water supplies of continents.

But the damage to the other creatures is not only through climate change or carbon emissions, man-made or not. They are being killed off, and they are losing habitat - mainly because bigger human populations need more food and more land.

I enjoy reading travel books - but the adventurers riding elephants through India or bikes across Eurasia or meeting primitive tribes in America or Africa also mention “things that were” and are no longer. Treeless plateaus had been forests in living memory; in larger jungles, tigers and elephants did not threaten land-hungry peasants, and bush meat was not being eaten to threatened extinction. Cities were not so flooded with peasants unable to make a living on their ancestral lands.

Photographs and films would tell us more stories if they were not so often fashionably cropped to show only the faces of grief or stoicism. See the strings of elephants plodding across bare lands to find a tree to eat. See the scenes of bare lands with a single picturesque tree - what happens when that one tree goes? See the villages set amid treeless dust, and compare with the National Geographic magazines of the 1930’s.

Most photos of bare and barren lands that we see in the news today are scenes of war, where soldiers foray and planes bomb. Successes in wars have traditionally been counted by the enemy dead. What also must be counted is the lasting damage to the land and the homes. It has always been assumed war-damage can be repaired - but damage remains visible from wars thousands of years back to ruins of 1941-45 and now.

Deserts are spreading faster than they are being reclaimed. Land-hungry people move into semi-desert, and it becomes more desert. Irrigation that could not handle salination has been causing deserts for thousands of years, and in Australia is a growing problem.

Where are the online documentaries and books that compare now with then in aerial pictures as well as on-site and maps?

There are now many books about the damage to the earth caused by people, yet the damage is accelerating. What has happened to all the precious metals and other minerals extracted for thousands of years, and which now require even more earth-damaging mining to find more? Why is the waste accelerating?

Where are the “unspoiled beaches” of my childhood? They used to be a tram-ride away. People seek other unspoiled beaches now, to spoil.

This sounds like wallowing in gloom - but it is meant to be crying “Fire!” which always causes people to do something.

Even small things can have big consequences in preventing damage. Governments do not always have to be the bodies to pay for all the action.

Australia could, for example, stop the baby bonus after the second child - so that we are not hypocrites if we try to help other countries to stabilise their runaway population growth. Going from a global population of 6 billion to 9 billion people in 50 years really is something to be terrified about. The drivers of population growth need to be challenged for promoting their own interests so selfishly.

There can be more urgent research about sustainable food-growing, and another way to prevent bushfires than burning off with its accumulating loss of nutrients through smoke.

We can urge that 4WDs do NOT go off the beaten tracks to spread more destruction. Goats should not be given as overseas aid to places where they will eat out sparse vegetation. We can stop tolerating the pests and vermin that are increasing even in our cities. We can salvage and re-use whatever we can, and find thousands of jobs for salvage, renovation and repairs, to replace the thousands of jobs that at present waste resources and lives. Boycott products with built-in-obsolescence. Insist that our cotton clothes are durable, to reduce the environmental costs of cotton-growing. We can save more forests by halving use of paper through not wasting it, and by not destroying so much good housing to build worse - without which tree-hugging is futile.

We can consider what exactly soldiers are doing to help the poverty-stricken populations in lands where they can appear as foreigners, without even language to communicate, but at immense environmental costs.

Native Americans are reported to thank the creatures that must eat for food. We can think of how the petrol we are driving with was once trees, billions of years ago. Our councils and galleries can have pictures of Then and Now, so everyone can see what we have lost or gained, and realise what we may still lose or gain.

Jonathan Swift said several centuries ago, that whoever could make two blades of grass grow where one grew before was a greater benefactor than - I forget who, but most of the celebrities we venerate. Today we need to be able to make trees and grass grow where nothing now grows.