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!
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