Eco-modernists put the population doomsayers in their box

Eco-modernists argue that population control is not the key to a healthier planet.

Cats arrived in Australia with the First Fleet and within 60 years had spread to the farthest extremities of a receptive continent. Killing billions of animals each year, feral cats have caused the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to raise the alarm on the precarious state of Australia’s reptiles.

Almost all of Australia’s reptile species, 975 in total, are included on the IUCN Red List of concern with 7 per cent threatened with extinction.

Domestic cats gone feral are a scourge on the environment and illustrate how human settlement can have profound and unintended consequences for the natural world.

Even triumphs of human engineering can come at significant environmental cost.

Long before the Snowy Mountains scheme became Malcolm Turnbull’s answer to the nation’s renewable energy revolution, conservationist Tim Flannery had taken aim at the nation-building wonder.

The Snowy scheme, he said in a 2003 Quarterly Essay, was an environmental catastrophe and the migrants who built it were the “innocent perpetrators of a national tragedy”.

“If we are ever to break the pernicious connection between our environmental mismanagement, disgraceful treatment of refugees and other victims, and lack of direction when it comes to the question of how many people we can support, we need to face some hard truths,” Flannery wrote.

“If things do not change, it will become more and more difficult to sustain even the number of people we have now, let alone take the vast number of refugees our foreign policy threatens to create in the days ahead.”

Fifteen years on, Australia’s population has hit 25 million, the refugee issue still muddles the consideration of population and there are no headcount targets, just the same arguments about high immigration being the servant of economic growth with little regard for environmental impact.

Sandra Kanck, president of Sustainable Population Australia, tells Inquirer that in terms of ecological services, things are constantly getting worse.

“In 1993 the (Australian) Academy of Science released a major paper that said on current consumption Australia could sustainably cope with no more than 23 million people by 2040,” Kanck says.

“We are now 25 million, with some of the highest rates of per-capita consumption in the world.”

Kanck says the only real way to tackle this is with a reduction in population. SPA favours an approach of zero net migration, whereby when one person permanently leaves the country, another can be let in.

“There is an assumption that we have a responsibility for everyone else in the world,” Kanck says. “But there are 65 million refugees on the move and there is no way Australia can take responsibility for all these people. The truth is, no matter how humane we are, we can’t simply open our borders and say we are responsible for the rest of the world. Yes, we can take a greater proportion of refugees but only if we reduce the number of other migrants. Our major concern is the environment and the pressure of urban sprawl.”

Left unchecked, population pressure will put Australia’s food production at risk, she says.

“The Murray-Darling Basin is under stress from irrigation. At this point in time we are able to export a lot of primary production overseas, but with an increasing population and climate change and reduced stream flows, it is unlikely that in 30 years Australia will be able to export any of its primary production.

“We should be concerned that when we are exporting any products, what we are effectively exporting is water and soil fertility, and we need to have a conscious awareness of that and decide if it is worth it.”

Since its 1993 report, the Australian Academy of Science has pulled back from nominating a population target for Australia. It now says although population size is part of the problem, the issue is bigger and more complex.

“There are many factors at play,’’ the academy says in its report, More Than Just Numbers.

“Essentially, it is what is happening within those populations — their distribution, their composition and, most importantly, their consumption patterns.”

When Australian consumption is viewed from a global perspective, the nation’s “ecological footprint” is second only to the US. If the rest of the world lived like Australia, we would need the equivalent of 3.6 Earths to meet the demand.

The academy says the way forward is to consume less and waste less, buy fewer physical goods, consume less electricity and purchase fewer items with packaging and waste.

Technology offers solutions including the development of responsible, genetically modified foods. And better education can help reduce unsustainable population growth and bring long-term benefits.

The “eco-modernist” movement is a global network of environmental thinkers who believe technological development rather than population targets hold the key to a better environment.

Traditional environmentalists and eco-modernists hold different views about the relationship between economic growth and environmental protection. For traditionalists, unchecked economic growth leads irrevocably to environmental disaster. But eco-modernists argue that as nations become affluent, economic growth slows and consumption becomes less material.

An eco-modernist manifesto published in 2105 says human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible but also inseparable.

It affirms one longstanding environmental ideal — that humanity must reduce its impact on the environment to make more room for nature — but rejects the notion that human societies must harmonise with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse. Eco-modernists say that despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental “limits to growth”, there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the near future.

Given present trends, it is possible that the size of the population will peak this century, then start to decline. As this happens, total human impact on the environment, including land-use change, over-exploitation and pollution, may peak and decline as well.

“By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth, even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends,” the eco-modernist manifesto says.

The key is to liberate the environment from the economy.

The evidence is that urbanisation, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture and desalination all have a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species, eco-modernists say.

By contrast, suburbanisation, low-yield farming and many forms of renewable energy production generally require more land and resources and leave less room for nature.

It is a recipe for bigger and denser cities that assumes richer communities will be better equipped to correct some of the mistakes of the past.

But it still leaves unresolved the question of cats, cane toads and other unforeseen effects of human settlement to date. In truth, these issues have little to do with population size but owe more to the folly of human nature.