Category: Columns

Apparently no Chinese ever uttered the curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Certainly, I have been cursed by descendants of the Central Kingdom, but mostly using English swear words involving money, or their daughters. Perhaps I misunderstood, I now have daughters of my own.

Regardless, we do live in interesting times: Water, grain, fish and energy are in short supply. The American empire declines along with its dollar. Interesting, indeed.

The media reinforces, every day, China’s role.

Amazon rainforest is cut down to grow soyabeans to feed pigs and cows destined for Chinese tables. The Kimberley is developed to exploit natural gas and iron ore for “the Far East”.

Given that the average Chinese earns less than one tenth the average Australian wage and consumes one tenth the resources, it seems churlish to deny them the opportunity to eat meat more than once a week, or to make a decent living. Chinese factories make the solar panels, shoes and gadgets that we want but can’t be bothered making.

Adidas, alone, has 700 factories in Shanghai to supply its global market. Wage rises and new regulations have driven the company to try and move offshore. Unfortunately, no other country can cost effectively absorb 700 sporting goods factories.

Prices of the three stripe running shoe will rise as a result.

The theory that Wall St traders, Madison Avenue marketing gurus and Rodeo Drive entertainment moguls can control the hearts, minds and hip pockets of the world’s consumers while the Chinese do the dirty work for next to nothing has come crashing into conflict with reality. Chinese banks now sit on cash reserves of $US1.3 trillion. Acts of Congress preventing the Chinese from purchasing American companies only postpone the inevitable.

Australian’s are insulated from these global machinations primarily because we happily sell our significant iron, aluminium, coal and natural gas reserves to the highest bidder. We’ve sold our biscuit manufacturers, dairy producers, mining and energy companies to foreign interests. We have slavishly followed the logic of level playing fields and free trade agreements in exchange for a cosy relationship with whatever empire holds sway. We switched allegiance from the Brits to the Yanks last century, and now mandarin Kev is taking Keating’s admonition that we are part of Asia to its logical conclusion.

As Sidney Kidman said when he opposed the purchase of large chunks of Australia by the British Vestey Brothers in the 1880s, the danger is that we lose control of the nation.

The answer is to buy Australian. It is an effort that many people think Quixotic, meaning foolish in the face of insurmountable odds. I interviewed Dick Smith on The Generator in March. He told me that his Buy Australian project, Dick Smith Foods, has been a commercial failure. Most of his suppliers have sold to international interests.

On the back of increasing oil prices, all goods will become more expensive. The cheapest goods will be those produced locally. If we knock down our factories, though, and ship the equipment to China, as we have done with our dairy processors, shoe manufacturers and other regional industry, we will have to go barefoot, or buy imported shoes at the going, inflated, price.

It may be interesting to indulge ourselves in stores stocked with goods from around the world but the relative dullness of local produce is far less dangerous.
Tellingly, the third line of the apocryphal curse is, “May you get what you want.”

Regular or otherwise, whatever the weather they head for the beach when they get here then catch a little local colour at Pottsville Beach, Tweed Boys Club or Kingscliffe market.

We all love the seaside, that’s why we’re here, but I confiscate their travel documents until they’ve done at least one trip inland. A beer at the Uki pub, a cuppa at Chillingham, coffee at Sphinx Rock Café or a picnic at Natural Bridge will do.

I’m not simply promoting the tourist trail, or our great natural beauty. It’s the agricultural wealth of the area that I like to emphasise.

As the global food shortage begins to dominate the front pages of the newspapers it pays us all to remember that agricultural land, fertile soil and regular rainfall are our most precious resources.

Australia might be rich because we export coal, iron ore and aluminium, but when push comes to shove, as the famous red indian on the t-shirt says you can’t eat money … or coal, iron or aluminium.

The farming families of the Tweed Valley have seen the dairy industry move to the Murray Darling, the bottom fall out of the sugar industry world wide, and the price of Macadamia’s plummet as South African farms flooded the world with cheap nuts.

Now, the Murray Darling is in real trouble, sugar is eagerly sought after as a source of energy.

It’s not just the dearth of water that is crippling the industrial scale farms across the Murray Darling basin, high diesel and fertiliser prices are killing them as well. There’s a lot to be said for the small family farm of 50 – 200acres that can be run by the people who live on it, selling the food locally. The agribusiness companies say that it is a relic of a bygone era, but the handful of people that have maintained small holdings, especially those that have rejected fossil fuel based fertilisers in favour of organic farming, are immune to the latest oil shock.

The world’s richest people are busily buying block up in them thar hills and laughing merrily all the way to the bank because the real estate prices inland are a fraction of what they are on the coast.

English rock stars, Israeli business magnates, retired European beauracrats all know that oil prices are never going down again, food shortages will get worse and that US Vice President Dick Cheney meant it when he said that Iraq “is the war that will not end in our lifetimes.”

They are heading for those corners of the world that have stable government, fertile soil and rainfall that will remain good despite global warming. There are not too many places in the world that fit that description. You and I live right on the edge of one. The Wollumbin caldera.

Our beaches may be magnificent, but our hinterland is unique.

Whatever else you do this winter, make sure you drive through it at least once.

And while you’re there, get yourself a little fresh food.

You’ll never eat better.

Meeting Gaia

James Lovelock is a scientist who invented a device in 1958 to detect minute concentrations of chemicals. It was used to show that pesticides like DDT accumulate in animals a long way from where they are used. He used it himself a decade later to show that ChloroFlouroCarbons (CFCs) were present in large concentrations in the Antarctic.

Lovelock was hired by NASA to design instruments that could find life on Mars if it existed. Lovelock started designing very sensitive instruments. Then he realised that they would be unable to differentiate between the contamination brought to Mars on the space ship and any life already there on the red planet.

He started to focus on ways to tell from the outside if life existed. He reached the remarkable conclusion that there is a very simple indicator of life and that is activity, or more accurately, instability.

Life consumes nutrients, extracts what it needs and exhales what it does not. It reorganises the world around it. There is one very significant thing about that reorganisation. It is more complex as a result of life than it would be without it. Plants consume sunlight, dirt and water and create forests. Animals eat plants and drink water and create societies.

When you look at a living thing from the outside you see change happening that cannot be explained by simple chemical processes. We see the seething compost and we know the worms are well.

Lovelock reported to NASA that he had completed his experiments and had proven that there was no life on Mars. They sacked him and insisted that he did not report his findings.

He went one step further. He founded a movement, named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia, based on the principle that the planet is alive. It is not just covered in life, it is, itself, a living organism.

There is no doubt in my mind that it is a very useful way to understand the systems which operate on a global scale.

When we describe the rainforest as the lungs of the planet we are using exactly such an analogy. When we look at the ocean currents and their interaction with the life that depends on them, it is a circulatory system we describe. David Suzuki reports that the Nitrogen in the temperate rainforests that blanket the west coast of the USA and Canada has all come from the sea in the bodies of salmon. On a planetary scale, I see small, salmon-shaped cells carrying nutrients through that circulatory system to an organ that helps the planet breathe.

This is not a far-fetched notion, it is a practical tool.

Diagnosing Gaia

As an organism, our body can deal with a wide variety of external temperatures. It can also deal with wide fluctuations in internal temperature. The testicles, for example, shrink into the body cavity when it is cold, and hang low when the body is hot, to maintain an even temperature for their precious cargo. The temperature of our blood, however, rarely strays more than a fraction of a degree from 36.8 on the Celsius scale. The medical definition of a fever is an increase of half a degree Celsius.

Scientists have reached a broad consensus that an increase of four degrees in the earth’s temperature will be fatal to life on earth as we know it. Humans will not be able to live north of Melbourne or south of Paris, the seas will become acid and will inundate almost all the great fertile river deltas of the world. The earth as a planet will survive. Living things will survive, but in the great planetary illness this represents, human civilisation will be thrown aside like a fevered patient sweats out body fluids.

With the planet as our patient, it is possible to observe some alarming truths.

Almost one per cent of the patient’s lungs are eaten away. More than ten per cent of the lungs have been damaged in the last decade alone.

The immune system of the planet is the wide range of species that exist, ready to adapt to changes in the environment and fill new niches in ecosystems as they respond to change. Over 50,000 species of plants or animals disappear off the face of the earth each year, irreversibly weakening this immune system.

More than 6.66% of the freshwater on the planet is consumed every year. This is rising above the rate at which it is replenished by rain and snow. That rate of replenishment is falling while the rate of consumption is rising.

These are not the causes of the illness, they are the symptoms. The cause of the illness is a virus that has invaded the earth’s ecosystems and is affecting the vital organs. That virus is rearranging the natural flows of Gaia’s systems. The destruction of the forests, for example, leads to reduced rainfall that makes the forests drier and more vulnerable to fire. This indirect  damage amplifies the damage caused directly.The nature of the virus is to grow more voracious as it develops. In those areas where it is most densely populated, it consumes resources from other parts of the planet, starving some areas and poisoning the immediate vicinity with its excretement.

For the good of the patient, the virus simply has to be brought under control. The supply of resources to those areas where the infection is most developed needs to be limited to give natural systems an opportunity to regain balance and to slow down the creation of toxic wastes. Those areas where the virus is multiplying rapidly need to be soothed to slow down the rate of infection. Mechanisms that encourage more benign strains of the virus to dominate need to be explored.

Evolution has favoured pathogens that are not too effective. The most effective pathogens kill their hosts before they have time to spread and are eliminated from the gene pool as a result.

With only one Gaia, we cannot afford to discover this law of evolution the hard way. We simply have to reduce our impact, quickly, or we destroy our civilisation.

There is no other choice.

The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.