A sense of place

A great many people round the world today live in countries that are not those they grew up in. This may be from choice — they emigrated from their country of origin, looking for a better life — or because they left, intending to go back, but never did, or because they were forced out by war or persecution. That may have been political, racial or even religious — the last less common than it used to be, but it still happens.

It’s a conventional cliché to picture expatriates getting together and reminiscing about (what was) home. I remember when I was a young man in the country then called Rhodesia, I and my fellow-Rhodesians used to get quite irritated with the English immigrants who poured into the country after WWII. They constantly referred to England as home while, as far as we — the native white Africans – were concerned, these people had come to Rhodesia to make a life and a home, so they should refer to their adopted country as ‘home’, and get on with adapting to whatever was different in the way of life there. This matter of integration into adopted countries is one of the major issues arising in relation to immigration programs. In Australia there have been long and heated arguments about multiculturalism, which is the policy that says immigrants are welcome to preserve and indeed maintain the cultural practices of their native countries, provided always they do not violate Australian laws and customs. This tends to result in ghettos; enclaves of foreign cultures within, but separate from, the mainstream. The other approach — far more sensible in my view (I haven’t moved far in my opinions in this area since I was young!) — is to aim at assimilation: integration of immigrants into the mainstream culture and society. This, in due course, should lead to a more coherent and unified society

But, whatever system pertains, most people who have emigrated (I suspect) hold in their hearts (as the saying goes — it’s actually nothing to do with hearts but all to do with heads) some image, some concept, albeit usually idealised, of the country and society in which they grew up. In most cases there is a strong element of nostalgia about this. I am not immune to it. I am Australian; this country has been good to me and my family and we are well integrated into its society. But at the root of my being, in my blood (another widely-accepted saying with doubtful physiological justification) I am an African. My roots are in the country where I, and my parents, were born; where I grew up. Intellectually I am well aware that that country no longer exists: it has been destroyed, socially, by the Mugabe regime that has governed it almost since the hand-over to black government in 1980 (there was a short-lived interim regime before he took over). Mismanagement and corruption have also gone a long way to destroying it physically. The countryside is denuded of trees around the towns; farms  that were well-kept and well-run have fallen into decay and ruin. Population pressure and poor farming practices are degrading the land. Except in remote areas, such as along the Zambezi, the wildlife has gone — although it must be acknowledged that this was largely the situation under white government. So I harbour no delusions about returning: that is not an option; there is no place for the likes of me in Zimbabwe. All I can do is visit Africa occasionally and sometimes, when something about Australia is particularly frustrating and irritating (such frustration and irritation are usually generated by politicians and the media) indulge in dreams of what might have been.

Diana and I left Rhodesia in 1964, just before Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, which led, a few years later, to bloody civil war with the African freedom fighters. The Rhodesians called them terrorists, but in the end international pressures and sanctions, as well as unsustainable losses, forced them to negotiate, leading to black government. We weren’t part of what was called ‘the chicken run’: those who left Rhodesia because of the political situation, but if we had stayed I would have had to fight in that war and could well have been one of its casualties. We left because I was pursuing a career — I wanted to be a scientist and to achieve that had to go where there was more opportunity. So we left Rhodesia and went to South Africa. A few years later, taking an unlikely opportunity, we went to Scotland. I wanted to find out if I could compete with people with PhDs from Oxford and Stanford; I wanted to publish papers in international journals and attend meetings where clever people presented the latest results from their research at the cutting edge of the field. So in Scotland and, later, England, I began to work my way into the sub-culture of the area of science I worked in and found that I could compete compete with those people with PhDs from Oxford and Stanford. I could publish papers in international journals and present my own research at high-powered meetings. I became a recognised member of the sub-culture. Time passed and dreams of returning to Africa faded and died. Eventually I was offered a senior job in Australia’s premier scientific organization. So we moved again.

The job in Australia represented the peak of what I could aspire to, a position from which I could influence science as well as work at it. Taking it up required a very steep learning curve, since I had become a manager and director of research and also needed to deal with the politics involved in forestry — the field of research that my division (as the unit was called) was concerned with. And we settled comfortably into Australia. My children thrived and grew into wonderful people with families of their own.

Through all this my wife, Diana, supported me loyally, ran our home and was the major partner in raising the children, so the way they have turned out owes much to her. For seventeen of the twenty-one years we spent in Canberra she also ran a large group of young people — more than a thousand passed through her hands over those years — organizing, supervising and taking part in activities that included challenging hikes, camping, hunting, teaching life-saving in winter-cold rivers and, through it all, endless counseling and discussions that prepared her charges for later life. It took a great deal of her time — weekend after weekend, trips into the bush that lasted ten days, often several times a year. It was my turn to provide support, both personal and financial. For that work she was awarded the Medal of he Order of Australia.

Now we are retired and have to admit to getting old. I am sad that there’s nothing I can do for Africa. The experience and knowledge — perhaps even a modicum of wisdom — that I have accumulated over fifty years could be useful there, but no-one would be interested. The teeming populations of Zimbabwe and South Africa, and all of sub-Saharan Africa, will continue to increase, pushing the cities and sprawling shanty towns ever further into the country; the bush and farmlands will be progressively degraded, either in the name of progress and mismanaged development or because of the continual pressure of poor people moving into any area where they can clear land and scratch a living. African politics seem unlikely to improve: corruption and nepotism will continue to flourish, driven by greed and selfishness and the lust for power.

Perhaps I am unduly pessimistic but I don’t think so. I regret that the world my grandchildren will inherit will be uglier and poorer than the one we have known, rent by tensions and wars generated by competition for water and resources and the increasing pressures of the poor and desperate on those places that remain good to live in. I regret that my grandchildren will never see the Africa that I like to remember. Perhaps they will be expatriates too, leaving Australia or Bermuda, where some of them are now growing up, to wander and settle in other countries, either on purpose or, like us, because of circumstances. In that case, as has always happened, dreams of the homeland and society where they grew up will probably haunt them too. But perhaps — who knows — my pessimism will turn out to be misplaced and humans will exercise the wisdom that undoubtedly exists in our societies to solve the world’s problems. That wisdom is currently smothered by materialism and stupid ideologies, but it needs to be released so that we might conserve and live in harmony with the natural world of which we are an integral part, not just in Africa, but everywhere.

On our problems and their (hypothetical) solution

2. Things that need attention – and how we might go about it

One of the obvious areas of concern for the world is the use, particularly by developed countries, of fossil fuels. We need to massively reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn. Fossil fuels provide most of the energy used throughout the world. The energy is far too cheap since no country puts a price on the adverse consequences of burning coal and oil. These include the air pollution emitted by cars and power plants, congestion from overloaded streets and highways caused by our obsessive love affair with motor transport in all its forms; oil spills, the health costs of coal mining and the damage to water supplies and landscapes caused by effluent from coal mines. The dangers of climate change caused and exacerbated by ‘greenhouse gases' such as the carbon dioxide that comes from burning fossil fuels, are becoming increasingly apparent.

All these effects should be costed. Imposing appropriate costs, probably best in the form of taxes, would radically alter patterns of resource use and pollution, but such taxes are ferociously resisted almost everywhere, and the political will and mandate to impose them on self-interested and willfully blind business communities do not exist in any of the major world economies. (The new carbon tax in Australia is a move in the right direction, although it’s seriously flawed in the level of refunds to polluters — for purely political reasons — which will greatly reduce its effectiveness.) Nevertheless, it is inarguable (assuming the arguments are objective and focussed on empirical information rather than ideological assertion) that the innovations associated with energy substitution, changes in transport systems, substituting other materials for plastics, and so on, would not only reduce pollution and conserve oil for high priority uses but would also generate new industries and jobs.

Mass production based on robotics, computer controlled machine tools and assembly lines turn out avalanches of cheap goods, ranging from cars to clothes. These production methods had their origin in the Industrial Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, and the American innovations in assembly line production of the early twentieth. As computer power, and the sophistication of machine tools have increased, the number of people employed, relative to the output of factories, has almost certainly fallen steeply (although I have no data to support this). Suggesting that we should ‘wind the clock back’ and revert to far greater use of manual labour — preferably skilled, with enough variation in the jobs done by individuals to make those jobs reasonably interesting and fulfilling — might sound like impractical utopianism, but it is conceptually possible. Converting concept into reality is another matter.

Plastics have a multitude of uses in modern societies, but many of them are trivial and wasteful. Packaging, and the waste to which packaging is a major contributor, uses absurd amounts of resources and energy. Most items purchased from a modern shop or supermarket are encased in at least two, and frequently up to four layers of packaging, most of which are plastic in some form. Rationalisation of this unnecessary use of materials is urgently needed.

Modern, large-scale but intensive, agriculture is responsible for world-wide soil degradation as well as being an enormous direct consumer of energy, and of artificial fertilizers herbicides, insecticides. The practices are defended on the grounds that they are essential to provide the food needed by burgeoning human populations. In fact agriculture practiced this way is essentially big business, and little of the food produced reaches the hungry masses in Africa and Asia. For example, huge amounts of corn in the United States go to feeding animals in feedlots and to ethanol production. Soy bean production in Brazil underlying large-scale destruction of the Amazon forests, is aimed at the American market. There is also an alarming trend for countries such as China (particularly) and the UK to buy up land in poor countries — mainly in Africa — and use it for large-scale food production. The products are exported out of the poor country, which may itself be short of food.

The soil loss and degradation associated with most large-scale agriculture will, in the near future become a matter of immense concern and importance as crop yields fall. The suggestion that large-scale agriculture should be abandoned in favour of small-scale, much more labour intensive systems, geared to conserve the soil as well as produce food and fibre, will no doubt be scornfully dismissed by many. They will argue that large-scale agriculture is essential to produce the food the world needs, which is a very dubious argument since most large-scale agriculture is carried on by agri-business companies and not much of the food produced by those, in the US and Australia and Canada, actually gets to the billions of underfed — or, indeed, starving — people in poor countries. They are expected to pay for it, and of course they can’t. A big re-think is needed in this area.

Factory farming — the cruel practice of raising chickens, pigs and cattle in intensely crowded conditions, where they are fed with (usually purpose-grown) grains, frequently laced with antibiotics — is said to be essential to provide the eggs and meat that society needs. There are other solutions, not least the perfectly feasible possibility of reducing the amounts of eggs and (particularly) meat in modern diets in developed countries. Furthermore, factory farming produces large quantities of manure which, because of the location of the production units in small areas, and the costs of transport and distribution, are not returned to the land.

Overfishing and the destruction of the once bountiful ocean fish stocks are already having massive impacts round the world. Large ships that can cross the world deploy nets kilometers long, clearing the oceans of life, dominate the fishing industries. United Nations statistics indicate that 80% of the world’s fisheries have either collapsed, or are on the brink of collapse. Collapse is indicated by population reductions to levels where they can no longer replace themselves and, unless fishing is stopped completely, the target fish species will become extinct. In some cases it is too late; they will become extinct anyway. In developed countries the lives of communities that have, for generations, been based on fishing, are no longer the same. Small trawlers, operating in areas where the catches are steadily falling, cannot compete with the industrial-scale ships. In many South-east Asian countries, and coastal areas of China, millions of people have depended on fishing for hundreds of years. Their livelihood has disappeared with the collapse of fish stocks, not only from over-fishing but also as a result of pollution from the land that has destroyed fish spawning areas. (This has some unexpected results: for example, many of the fishermen in southern Indonesia have resorted to using their boats to transport people trying to enter Australia illegally — people smuggling.)

And so we could go on. The question is: HOW are we going to change things? How can these developments be reversed in the face of ever-increasing human numbers and demands? The answer, I think, is already clear. Action has to come from the younger generation; the people born in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s have to lead and implement action. The problems will be solved — unless solutions are imposed by disasters — by leadership from that generation and by groups of young people developing solutions to problems that they want to focus on, whether those be concerned with energy and transport, the use of plastics, agriculture, fisheries, local pollution or whatever. Campaigns will have to be political and at every level: local, regional, national and international. Eventually, the economic and political dinosaurs who dominate the scene in the developed countries will have to be swept away and replaced by more enlightened groups who understand that wealth and survival in a pleasant world do not consist of rampant and unbridled materialism, which destroy in the name of progress, the natural systems of our world, and the world of every other creature. (It all sounds a bit like early communism and the workers’ campaigns, but we should remember that those were remarkably successful; the fact that state communism was a flawed system does not alter that fact.)

A principle that should be followed in every case is that the problem solving and campaign procedures should be evolutionary. Evolution in biological systems is a process of producing optimum solutions to the problems of survival of living organisms — whether they be plants or animals. The individuals or groups best adapted to particular conditions, and therefore best equipped to survive, are more likely to do so than less well-adapted individuals. If the traits that confer an advantage are genetically transmissible, they are likely to be passed on to succeeding generations. An essential part of the process is selection in response to pressure, whether that is engendered by environmental factors, predation, competition or whatever. So, by analogy, in trying to produce solutions to the problems created by humans, it is not sensible to focus single-mindedly on particular actions that appear, at first sight or to some group or individual, to be the most likely to solve a particular problem. Obviously the solutions proposed must be feasible and economically sensible — which doesn’t mean they have to create financial wealth, but does mean they have to recognise that people need an income to live. Initial decisions have to be taken about what actions should be implemented. In parallel with their implementation, there should always be evaluation of the results and there should be flexibility to change if the results are not as good as they could be or the approach adopted is clearly not working well. In other words, select out the sub-optimal solutions. To do this there has to be a mechanism of evaluating the results, and a willingness to constantly think of better solutions. That way, the procedure evolves with time towards the best that can be done, and can be changed if conditions change. There is no room for stubborn ideology.

In all this, we have to remember that changes in developed countries will affect the billions of people alive today who are not in any position to worry about resource use and environmental matters. For most of the teeming poor of Africa, India, South America and Asia the problem is  getting hold of enough food and fuel to survive and live half-decent lives, with a reasonable modicum of dignity and some hope of improvement. So, while the rich world has to think about reducing its extravagant consumption, ways must be found for the poor and underprivileged to raise their standards of living to levels commensurate with that reasonable modicum of dignity and comfort. But the history of virtually any part of the world shows us that humans are basically selfish, short-sighted and more inclined to aggressive defence of what they have than to large-scale altruism. There is not much chance that the rich nations will unselfishly cut their energy and resource use while making serious contributions — by which I mean a lot more than the nominal contributions to aid made by most of them — to the development of poor countries. We will hold stubbornly to our course, with predictably ugly results, mainly in Asia and Africa but increasingly in the developed western world (which includes China). The human race is unlikely to become extinct, but it is very likely that the combined effects of climate change, massive human populations and the resulting degradation of the earth will mean that those parts of the world where life can be enjoyed in pleasant environments, without enormous stresses, will be progressively reduced.  A cheerful outlook!

On our problems and their (hypothetical) solution

1. The overall situation

I have the word ‘hypothetical’ in the title of these pieces because I doubt the problems of the world will be solved before the ecological and human disasters already happening in Africa and India and parts of China become more widespread. Part of the trouble is that the problems are not universally acknowledged. Denial cannot  lead to solutions. The will to solve them is lacking at both the political and social levels. How widespread and serious the problems become before serious efforts are made to address them is an open question. Despite this, it seems worthwhile to think about how they could be solved. Maybe some of the ideas will be useful to someone.

Large numbers of people, especially among the educated classes — those the conservative (‘right wing’) press calls the chattering classes — are well aware of the problems that humans have generated for themselves and this planet. We know that the way we live now is unsustainable: we’re using renewable resources faster than they can be replaced – destroying fish stocks and forests and using up non-renewables, ­like oil and phosphates for fertilizer, without putting enough effort into solving the problem of what we will substitute for them when they’re all used up. We also know about the consequences of unbridled resource use, in terms of pollution and land degradation and, among the nastier results of human behaviour, the gross pollution of the world by plastic — thrown away to degrade the land and float in the oceans as millions of tons of long-lived garbage, killing huge numbers of sea birds and turtles and dolphins that ingest it.

Most of those who know about all this are worried by it, and there are indications that their numbers are growing, but they’re still small compared to the number of those who don’t understand the consequences of human behaviour or, in many cases, don’t want to know. Many people also realise that unbridled materialism —the accumulation of possessions and indulgence in the luxurious lifestyles that the well-to-do in developed countries take for granted — is not necessarily conducive to happy and contented lives. To a large degree it’s those luxurious lifestyles that are responsible for the pollution and ecosystem degradation; to maintain them demands inputs of energy and resources at greater rates than the world can sustain. Consumerism and luxurious living are the hallmarks of success in our societies; the idea that people should forego buying anything they want has been anathema until recently. A ‘quotation of the day’ in the New York Times, recently, provided a neat summary of the situation: "It was nothing to buy whatever we wanted. Now we just think about what we really need.” Clearly it’s time that everyone thought about what they really need.

None of that will be news to most people. The problem is: how to break the pattern and change the model. Humans being what they are, there’s no point in proposing solutions that would be unacceptable to all but the most idealistic individuals. Nevertheless, the solution — insofar as there is one — must lie in reducing our standards of living, and altering the way the economies of the developed world function. And that has to be achieved without reducing the opportunities for everyone to find what is called ‘gainful employment’; work that pays them enough to keep themselves and their families in reasonable comfort in terms of housing, food and clothing. What constitutes ‘reasonable comfort’, and how much more than that we can expect will certainly be matters for argument, but it’s probably realistic to assume that those whose jobs in themselves offer satisfaction are likely to be content with less in the way of material possessions than those whose work is nothing more than a means to an end. Unfortunately, for most people work is, in varying degrees, tedious, tiring drudgery or, at best, an acceptable way of passing the time with the benefit of providing an income. Ideally, it should be fulfilling and rewarding, providing a sense of accomplishment, of something worthwhile achieved on a timescale satisfying to the individual.

Politicians tend to be sensitive to joblessness and, when the numbers of people without jobs get too high — as is currently the case in the United States, where the jobless rate is around 9% (exactly how that is calculated is not clear to the general public) — there is much pontificating about the need to create jobs, although how this is to be done usually remains opaque. The usual approach is to try to generate more (conventional) economic growth, more consumption. The same old, same old story. But, besides the fact that ever-increasing consumption is unsustainable, the advocates of economic growth tend to ignore the fact that, in the United States and much of Europe in recent years, it has been funded by excessive borrowing, and the resulting debt and has got those countries into serious difficulties. So we need to think again. The aim must be to create millions of satisfying jobs that that lead to more contented and equitable societies and are consistent with reduced consumption of energy and resources. This alone will need a considerable re-think about economics.

I don’t accept the bland (and, in my view, stupid and shortsighted) assurances of various economists, right-wing commentators and red-necked conservatives that all will be well if we can maintain economic growth and consumer spending. The idea that economic growth can continue indefinitely, which is the assumption underlying the way most modern societies are run, is completely unrealistic. Economic growth reflects the capacity of the economy to produce goods and services. It therefore reflects the consumption of energy and materials, as well as human inputs as services. It is modern consumption of raw materials and energy that cannot be sustained.

In seeking solutions for the world’s problems it is sometimes tempting to entertain the idea that we might free ourselves entirely from the tyranny of economics, but that isn’t a useful approach: economics (which should not be confused with economic growth) is a system of assigning values to goods, services and labour; human interactions have been governed by economic systems for millennia. But it’s not an inviolate set of rules; the values assigned to particular goods or activities change with time and from place to place. We have to bring about changes in our economic systems that are based around the re-ordering of values. For example, we will have to change the — generally very low — values we assign to environmental services. We will also have to re-value upwards (i.e. make much more expensive) goods  that use a great deal of energy in their manufacture, including plastics made from oil.

This will require political action as well as changes in consumer demand, neither of which will come easily. Nevertheless, it seems worth thinking about the sort of changes and action that are required. It’s also worth thinking about the procedures we would need to follow to make progress; I have some comment on that later in this piece. At the moment there’s no indication, in any developed society, that the political will to restructure society exists; most politicians are concerned primarily — if not entirely — with their own influence, prosperity and political survival. These are seen to depend on pandering to their electorates and being seen to be acting in the (perceived) best short-term and selfish economic interests of those electorates. Leadership and vision are conspicuously lacking in virtually all the developed world —at least in the democratic countries, where focus groups and opinion polls substitute for political leadership. In the United States the whole political process is distorted by the financial power of special interest lobbyists.

Following on from that, it is also essential that international banking and finance systems, with their arcane and complex packaged securities, bonds and derivatives and structured debt packages, be brought under control to halt the distortion of markets that they cause. The behaviour of these institutions has undoubtedly contributed to the extent of current problems, since they represent and enhance the delusion that money and materialism are the ultimate arbiters of value.