Natural selection

A wide range of scientists, farmers and writers argue we each should do something to protect the world, even if others don’t.

More frequent bushfires, droughts and floods are seen by many as a sign of climate change.

Just as copies of Griffith Review 63began hitting the shelves, arriving from the forefront of climate science, a US-led team of scientists published an ­article in the journal Nature Climate Change.

They say the degree of confidence that human activities are causing an increase in heat on the Earth’s surface has reached a five-sigma level. That is a statistical convention indicating there is only a one in 3.5 million chance that such warming is a purely natural occurrence. The same level of certainty was required before scientists were willing to acknowledge the existence of the Higgs boson particle.

So, it may be time to read Julianne Schultz’s introduction to Writing the Country, an essay ­titled On Suicide Watch?, knowing that bleeding edge science has now removed the need for that question mark.

In her piece, the outgoing editor of the ­Griffith Review (author Ashley Hay takes the reins from this number forward) describes a world in a state of emergency:

The speed with which climate change is reshaping the environment suggests that this sense [that the world as we know it may not always be there] is well grounded. Extreme weather events have become the new normal, once-dry cities are learning to cope with floods, coastlines are changing shape, longstanding records for heat and cold, rain and drought are shattered every year and the extinction count reaches new highs.

Schultz’s arguments are neatly summarised. She has a broad range of reference and the ­quotations punctuating her editorial are small detonations of common sense and informed concern. The problem, of course, is that the scope of the problem she outlines is so broad, the damage so widespread yet so disparate — the implications of our actions over time so hard to calibrate and weigh, both now and into the future — that the mind reels and scampers for the safety of old certainties.

The challenge of Writing the Country is that it asks us not to flinch and look away. The virtue of this edition is that it draws on a true republic of minds to argue that we should not. In these pages we find indigenous activists and fifth-generation white graziers, archeologists and accountants, scientists and historians, poets and novelists.

We discover a mongrel assemblage, in other words, writing from positions so diverse that they may as well occupy different orbits in our solar system. And yet all of them argue, after their fashion, that writing about Australia’s place today demands that we take seriously ­issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social justice for the first Australians.

The stakes are too high and the ends are too terrible to contemplate, wherever it is that each contributor starts from.

Extreme situations do, however, demand ­extreme responses, and a willingness to explore possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise be countenanced. In Kim Mahood’s lovely, wounded essay on the survival of indigenous knowledge across the continent, to take one example, the author is forced to concede that continuous ­culture and knowledge of place — particularly via indigenous languages — no longer exists in many instances (or else resides in language communities so small that they have effectively ceased to be able to communicate).

While on a trip to a remote part of her family property, to visit the place where her parents’ ashes were left years before, Mahood worries at the extent of her custodianship. Does she have an obligation to preserve local lore if there are no indigenous voices left to do so?

It’s Ngardi country, a language spoken now by only a handful of elderly people. When this place last heard its own language spoken is anyone’s guess. I should have thought to bring the recording I made ten years ago of Dora Mungkina Napaltjarri, Ngardi speaker and traditional owner of this patch of desert. Sorry country, I say. Wiyarr, ngurrara. I’ll remember next time. Will it be enough, and do I have the authority, to keep this thread of the Dreaming alive?

Where some contributors follow Mahood in seeking to triage the natural and human world, museum staff saving old masters from a flood, others see the moment as one holding potential for more active change.

Stephen Muecke’s A Fragile Civilisation proposes that we reimagine what that term means in the Australian context. He is leery of the Western view of civilisation, long based on the notion of the polis, in which a socially stratified population lives in an urban hub, from which the spokes of power extend until a determined boundary, often described by a wall, a wall ­designed to keep barbarians at bay.

But the civilisations that managed to survive in Australia before Western arrival operated differently and with enviable success (if we regard success as living with relative plenty while not running out of water or depleting soil or changing climate to such an extent that the atmosphere becomes hostile to life). As Muecke, a professor of ethnography, points out, with ­regard to American anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner’s 1937 work A Black Civilisation:

If the Yolngu [people of the nation’s Top End] have flourished for up to fifty thousand years, while the kind of civilisation based on large cities could self-destruct after only a few hundred, perhaps it is time to recalibrate what we mean by civilisation.

Instead Muecke defines it as ‘‘planned, sustainable collective living’’ and then sets out to see what it is we could learn from indigenous cultures, and how this wisdom might be grafted on to contemporary societies facing unprecedented challenges.

Muecke is not alone in calling for a reappraisal of how we assess nature. Valuing country, by author Jane Gleeson-White, asks us to think again about how we go about putting a price on the natural world.

For her, modern capitalism has tended to render the natural world invisible, just another infinitely renewable resource to be turned into products that may be bought and sold. This blind spot has meant the universal drive ­towards economic growth has the concomitant effect of trashing the very world that sustains us all. As she quotes from ‘‘On Valuing Nature’’, a 1991 paper by legendary Macquarie University academic Ruth Hines:

Nature is excluded from accounting valuations. And how could it be otherwise? All in nature are interdependent: my little rainforest cannot be bounded and separated from the Rubber Tree … People are part of nature, aren’t they? But accounting, like any language, names, bounds and thus separates.

But there are moves afoot by canny economists and accountants to shift how we measure and ascribe value. ‘‘Natural capital’’ and ‘‘rights of nature’’ are two developments that venture to reconfigure capitalism, to save it from its own destructive success.

Gleeson-White, whose 2015 book Six Capitals explored many of the ideas bruited here, takes us to the vanguard of efforts to turn biophysical measures into monetary ones.

It is this effort, to assert the interdependence of apparently unrelated things, places, systems, that guides those essays dealing more strictly with issues of ecology. James Bradley’s The Cost of Consumption starts from the point that it is we, citizens of the rich West, who are least able to appreciate the true horror behind the statistics produced in reports such as the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Report, not just because we have outsourced and offshored many of the visible manifestations of our galloping consumption, but also because we are the primary beneficiaries of that consumption.

Bradley, a writer and critic, draws on two graphs from the WWF report and uses them to unpack a conundrum. One, dealing with certain human advances over recent decades, acknowledges the virtues that have accrued from globalisation and technological and scientific advances. It notes the millions raised out of poverty, the diseases cured, the child mortality rates cut, the labour-saving modern conveniences expanding ever deeper into communities that have historically lacked them.

But, he continues, ‘‘The graphs also starkly illustrate the effect of human consumption on Earth’s natural systems’’:

Increased demand for land, energy and water is driving massive degradation of the systems we depend upon for our survival. Destruction of forests and other habitats for cities and farms and mining is destroying the habitats of animals; diversion of rivers for energy and irrigation is disrupting water supplies and degrading freshwater ecosystems; rising temperatures and acidifying waters are killing coral reefs, and overfishing is emptying the oceans.

Bradley, who edited The Penguin Book of the Ocean, concludes with a quip from the Canadian marine biologist Ransom Myers, who, when asked where all the fish had gone, replied that it was no mystery: ‘‘We ate them.’’

If it is us, in Australia and the rich West, who are benefiting from such degradations, then it is our responsibility to ensure they do not continue. In the face of such awareness, arguments that run along the lines of ‘‘even if we do something, others won’t’’ seem deeply improper, almost obscene. Bradley admits the situation can seem hopeless. Yet he also makes the point that the solutions to all these issues exist in the here and now. Renewable energy, better land use practices, a more equitable distribution of wealth: all these ground-level tools could be deployed — if we had the political will.

Exemplary in this regard is Charles Massy, a former merino breeder and Monaro grazier who went back to university in his 50s to complete a doctorate in ecology. The 2016 book that resulted from that research, Call of the Reed Warbler, reconfigured questions of traditional agricultural land use for the 21st-century. His essay here, Transforming Landscapes, concentrates his larger argument; he, like Bradley, acknowledges the suicidally selfish behaviour that has led us to this point; and like Bradley, too, he sees seeds of hope:

Feasible solutions exist, but these solutions are not coming from ‘‘the top’’ — neither from politics nor the ‘‘big end of town’’. Rather, they are grassroots solutions. And many are appearing from an unlikely group of radical insurgents hitherto largely ignored by the mainstream.

Other contributors include Country Women’s Association grandmothers, urban beekeepers, permaculture designers, woke agronomists, ethical investment-fund managers, and farmers across the vast country who have run out of patience with agribusiness as usual. The question that haunts this Griffith Review is the same one that haunts Bradley, Massy and new editor Hay: Are there enough of us? And have we enough time?

In Crossing the Line, Hay travels into far north Queensland with her scientist husband. Ostensibly they are searching for a certain species of mosquito that, assisted by climate change, has moved south to the Australian landmass, where it is a vector for several highly communicable and dangerous illness.

While the pair move though the exquisite verdancy of that world, she rolls around in her head the hard numbers behind climate change. Is the Great Barrier Reef doomed? The answer, definitely, is yes.

Have our rainfall levels and river systems declined to the point where we will run out of water? The answer, most likely, is yes. Have carbon dioxide levels gone non-­linear — that is, have they decoupled from human activities and become part of a system that has moved out of our control?

When Hay puts this to Griffith University emeritus professor Ian Lowe, he replies: “We’re doing an uncontrolled experiment … in the fullness of time, we’ll know what happens next.’’

On current settings, our planet is set to ­exceed 1.5C above historical averages about 2032. And, at a cautious estimate, we pass through the 2C limit — the “here be dragons” ­region of global warming — in December of 2044.

An interesting side-calculation for those with children or grandchildren is to work out how old they will be when those dates are reached.

As Hay makes her way back to Rockhampton by train, watching the southern seep of the bioregional zone, contemplating the death of the reef, the smothering of mangroves — ‘‘the thickness of so much long-dead life pressed into so much dark black coal’’ — she is moved to write the following words:

What I can try and do is pay attention. This trip, and all these stories are a kind of witnessing of what is going on, a way of saying, even gently, see this place? See how it is in this moment?

‘‘With the extent and rate of change we’ve locked in now,’’ she concludes, ‘‘you won’t see it like this again — not in your lifetime.’’

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Writing the Country

Edited by Julianne Schultz and Ashley Hay

Griffith Review 63, 296pp, $27.99