The Independent Australian

 2004 Fenner Conference on the Environment

Understanding the Population-Environment Debate;

 Bridging Disciplinary Divides.

 

Your editor, a scientist with environmental interests, reports on an important conference, held in May in Canberra, which had virtually no publicity. We hope that it will have some influence behind the scenes.

The Australian Academy of Science has made a valuable contribution to debate among academics on the title issues. Each person leaves a ‘footprint’ on the land in environmental terms. There are specialists in population issues and specialists in environment issues. Rarely do they get together. All the speakers were leaders in their disciplines and for brevity the cvs have been omitted. 

The topic was selected by Professor Frank Fenner, AC, because ‘The research, policy and general communities must address the Population–Environment issue within a pluralist, inter-disciplinary framework.’ Fenner has generously endowed the Fenner Conferences on the Environment.

 

 

Summary

 

• interdisciplinary studies are inherently difficult

• promotion is easiest through specialization so few are willing to bridge interdisciplinary matters.

• it is career threatening for an academic to tackle the topic, especially in the humanities, mainly due to explicit or implied accusations of racism.

• geography should be at the centre of the population-environment debate, but the discipline shows little or no interest in it.

• there is no external interest or pressure from business, media or the environment lobby (the latter carefully avoids the topic) to stimulate academic research.

• the media treats population and environment as  different topics, covered by different journalists, so the topic falls through the gap. The media needs public persona, simplifiers, for quick bites.

Did any good come of the conference? There was total agreement that increasing population increases pressure on the environment unless steps are taken to reduce consumption of resources. Since the participants are leaders in their fields they may well initiate some research as a result of the conference. 

What is needed

 

Population numbers cannot be turned on and off like water from a tap. Currently the Government operates on a day-to-day set of uncoordinated policies.

There was agreement, from proponents of higher population to lower, that the Government should have a population policy. It should include a best guess number and then everybody could work backwards as to what that would mean in physical and social impact. Academics would be more likely to receive research grants to fund students to specifically tackle aspects of the population-environment nexus. The hard reality may mean revision of the number or greater attempts for amelioration of the impact on the environment.

Once a number and policies for achieving that number have been announced the debate will move on to the public arena and be given prominence in the media. 

 

The Politicians

The opening address was given by Dr David Kemp, then Minister for the Environment. 

The speech honed in on sustainability as the issue, saying that there is no simple equation between population growth and environmental damage. He conceded that settlement had damaged the environment, but placed considerable faith in innovative technology to solve some of the physical environmental problems. As is usual with such speeches we were treated to a resume of the Government’s achievements, which was modest and all of it was about the environment area. There was not one word about population policies, nothing about the difficulties of overcoming past deficiencies while achieving sustainability against a record inflow of people. The issue was dodged. The Government refuses to adopt a population policy. There was no question time.

There was nobody from other political parties, presumably not invited.

 

The Historian

Julie Klein (USA) gave an historical background to the formation of disciplines. Originally the word meant teaching disciples and that meaning still holds with disciplines ‘controlling their boundaries’. Disciplines are not just about a focus on a subject matter, but also about power. Disciplines evolve their own language, not understood by other academics, let alone ordinary people. Finally:

We must also take the trans-disciplinary step of involving non-academic and public discourse and disseminating results in the public sphere.

 

The Philosophers

Arran Gare warned us that as philosophers took nothing for granted, they find it difficult to contribute. Mainstream philosophers place a high priority on freedom of the individual, so therefore favour free movement of people. Philosophers from historian or scientific background look more at constraints, He attacked neoclassical economics, which treats people as responding only to the market and takes no account of metaphysical assumptions. There is now a school of human ecology which attempts to concentrate on the community as the moving force.

Cliff Hooker is a philosopher with a scientific background with an interest in susceptibility. He emphasized the difficulty of pulling together an interactive model when the participants were specialists all working with incomplete data and uncertainties in their projections. The physical scientists use empirical data, but human affairs uses an ‘evaluative’ approach, which ethical (eg, not endangering human life) and other constraints come into play. So even with the best will it is not easy to model the interaction between population and the environment.

For example, there is a study of the dike structure at Nyngan that integrates the hydrodynamics and climate models that produce flooding with the engineering structures of the dikes – with the reaction of the community to those dikes.

The town of Nyngan typically makes developmental decisions on a less than 10-year scale. The floods occur on a 20- to 50-year scale. So the hydrologists and the sociologists just don’t see eye to eye on spatial scale, for starters.

Hooker suggests a Robust Adaptive Strategy, which means in simple language, keeping as many options open as possible.

 

The Scientists

  Robert Wasson is a geologist, who has specialized on water catchments, including the effects of climate change. His talk was on the broad issue of carrying capacity. He warned environmentalists not to embrace a simple linear relationship between   population and environmental damage.

Carrying capacity has been defined as the number of individuals who can be supported in a given area within natural resource limits, and without degrading the natural, social, cultural and economic environment for present and future generations. The carrying capacity is not fixed. It can be changed by improved technology, but mostly it is changed for the worse by pressures which accompany a population increase,

The relationships below are not linear relationships. The equations and similar ones hold in the developed world. In the developing world poverty needs to be added to these equations. Poverty is the greatest threat to the world’s non-human environment, not affluence, for the simple reason that poor people have no choices, affluent people do.

Barry Commoner equation:

 Environmental impact = population x consumption per person x impact per unit of consumption.  

Ehrlich and Holden equation:

Environmental impact = population x affluence x technology.

 

 

Barney Foran is a CSIRO scientist, whose work will be known to those of you who received Summer 2003 (issue 1), as the lead author in Future Dilemmas, a comprehensive study of future demands on Australia’s resources.

 He opened with striking slides to emphasize the question ‘Can it go on for ever?’ [apologies; we can’t run to colour but you can get the message]

 

Charts were also produced for land and water  use.

Foran then provided a breakdown of the structure of contributions to greenhouse emissions over the last 30 years.  (The analysis for land and water use has not yet been carried out.)

GREENHOUSE EMISSIONS

ACCELERATORS

Population growth +1.1%

Economic growth         +1.5%

Industrial structure         +1.0%

Export  volume         + 0.8%

Residential energy mix + 0.1%

                    + 4.5%

RETARDANTS

Industry energy intensity -1.3%

Fuel mix                     -0.3%

Export mix                 -0.1%

Final demand mix         -0.2%

Destination of final         -0

demand mix           -2.1%     OVERALL   +2.3%

 

He then asked how can we pull the levers to reduce the growth. It has to be done sensitively to avoid disruption. 

Increased population growth is almost a given in debate these days. It would be a hard sell to convince the Australian public the benefits of low economic growth. Our industrial structure and export volumes are dictated by our position as a supplier of mining and agricultural products to the world.  The government and the world economy have full speed ahead on the accelerants, with some feeble attempts at a micro level to change the domestic energy intensity.

 

 The Economists

Richard Denniss had a simple message - economics has been pre-occupied with maximizing economic growth and the models usually recognise only labor and capital as the restraints. Environment was external and population was exogenous (ie given). A few are starting to look at other restraints and since economics is about how to organise the best results from  a finite resource there is no reason why population and environment can’t be bought in.

Glenn Withers has been a proponent of high immigration and of multiculturalism for many years. He felt that Denniss was understating how economics was taking on board environmental and population concerns. He looked at Fenner’s concerns - world population growth, world poverty and greenhouse warming. Population growth was endogenous to economic growth because the latter brought on an educated female population and reduced fertility. Hence world population was likely to peak and poverty was declining in nations like India and China where the economy was booming due to release from authoritarianism. However economics is weakest in dealing with natural systems where the spill-overs are large and pervasive. The market doesn’t reflect this, so the market doesn’t economize properly on those impacts. He sees market prices and property rights as the way forward in some areas to ensure best economic use of scarce resources.

He saw no reason to not expand population, conditional on government protecting the environment.

 

 If our politicians don’t deliver on that, then they should not be able to expand the population substantially through immigration.

In discussion Withers said that he is now a proponent of government selecting a population number. He served on a committee of inquiry for Bob Hawke on population and Australia’s future. The committee agreed with the intellectual case that a number was not sustainable, it would mislead, inevitably it would change with technology, behaviour and characteristics of the population and so on. So the committee ended up not even putting a number forward as to an appropriate target for Australia’s population. What that meant was that the bureaucracy just did nothing. The status quo prevailed, we muddled through afterwards. He even advocated:

 If you give even the wrong number, you are engaging the issue. You are opening it up to debate and discussion. ...I would actually come round to the position now that any number is a good start, because extreme numbers are not going to get up and reasonable numbers are going to open up the sorts of discussions we are having here today, instead of allowing the bureaucracy to bury the whole issue because it is all too hard.

 

  The Geographers

 

Ruth Fincher’s proposition was that geographers have steered away from the public debate on the population-environment nexus because of the controversy associated with Griffith Taylor in the 1920s. (Griffith Taylor advocated certain tropical and desert areas should not be settled or cultivated. He was ahead of his times and was attacked by the ‘Australia Unlimited’ school)). The issue quickly develops into polemics.

At a national level the question of an optimal population is too hard, but studies are being conducted at regional levels. Tourism is a factor in some regions. Fincher concluded:

 I think contemporary geographers have concluded by voting with their feet on involvement in a reconstitution of the population-environment debate, affected as they have been by Griffith Taylor’s experience with it, and they are working in such a way as to be claiming that if environmental degradation is what we want to stop, then a general population policy of national numbers is not the pathway to this, and a regionally specific population policy is very difficult to achieve.

Graeme Hugo, a geographer with interest in population issues, was disappointed at the withdrawal of geographers from the population-environment debate. He blamed lack of interest by geographers as also due to structural problems. Geographers are dividing into physical and social geographers, not tackling the whole. Australian Research Council funding practices encourage this division. At a university level geography is being sqeezed out by faculties wishing to maximize their first year student income by keeping the latter inside their faculties.

Hugo advocated dedicated funding to study the population-environment issue.

 

  The Peak Conservation Organization Leaders

Philip Toyne (a past ACF Executive Director) spoke at the dinner. He ran through the ACF policy on population. The objectives are to stabilize population at a level which is precautionary and ecologically sustainable and immigration to Australia should be looked at in terms of ecologically sustainability and our humanitarian commitment to accept refugees.  He asserted that Australia was not living sustainably at the moment and listed the environmental  degradation. Added to this was the possibility that recent climatic conditions might be permanent. Toyne was unequivocal that:
 

The message is plain to me. We can’t claim to be on a sustainable trajectory at our current number of Australians with our current consumption habits...  ...there is an obvious need to apply the much talked about but rarely adopted precautionary principle.

 

Peter Garrett took up sustainability as his theme; population was a subset of that, which the media did not seem to see. (This was as president of the ACF, before his move into politics.) The first thing to examine was ecological health and he was clear that:  

..can’t, or shouldn’t increase our population if we continue to have the similar economic condition, if we continue to be the hot, heavy and wet economy that produces lots of greenhouse gases and wastes lots of water and uses lots of enegy. Economically it produces results, but ecologically it produces bad consequences.

 

Given the speeches, one might have expected the ACF to be urging the Government to take a precautionary line on immigration, especially with the latter being at record levels. When asked why the ACF was remarkably quiet on immigration, Garrett said the primary task was the way the economy works.

In effect the ACF is pinning all on technology and the ‘hairshirt approach’ to reducing consumption. The precautionary line on immigration is quietly sidelined. Why not promoted? Political correctness? Katharine Betts attempted to explain.

 

 The Sociologists/Demographers

 

Katharine Betts is a sociologist and a demographer and an opponent of high immigration. Her title was ‘Keeping Quiet About Growth : Why Sociologists And Demographers Don’t Analyse Its Environmental Effects.’ The forthright address was the only one to receive a spontaneous burst of applause from the audience.

Over the last four years there have been few articles on the population-environment nexus in Australia in the demographic journals and none in the sociological journal.

Why? Maybe the disciplines don’t think that there is a problem. Betts suggested other influences.

• Narrowness of specialists.

• Scarcity of rewards. For example the word is out that anybody criticising Melbourne 2030, Brack’s attempt to put a million more people into Melbourne, will not get a research grant.

• Peer group pressure. 

Analysing the ill effects of high levels of per capita consumption is acceptable in social science circles because it means blaming ourselves.

 

 

Analysing the adverse environmental consequences of population growth can now be taken as blaming immigrants. This invites condemnation as ethnocentrism, selfishness, even racism.

 

There are many surveys on immigration, but only two on population, which show support for growth declining.

Attitudes to population growth, 1977 and 2001, %

                         1977      2001

Prefer stability (in 2001 reduction)          50          64

Prefer growth                  48         36

Betts then examined a survey in 2001 of Federal candidates in which they were asked if environment was one of their top four concerns. As expected results went from 94% for the Greens to 37% for the Coalition. But 60% of those putting environment in the top four thought that the number of immigrants allowed into Australia had not gone far enough or nearly far enough! 

Voters were far less enthusiastic about immigration, as can be seen from the table at the bottom of the page (see right hand column). But the same paradoxical association; the higher the concern for the environment the more support there is for an increase in immigration. And the correlation was even stronger, 35%, among those who said that they were members of an environmental group.

 

 

Betts sees the answer not at a logical level. Concern about the environment now often comes as a package including new left cosmopolitan internationalist values, In this set of values, restrictions on immigration are seen as inhumane, exclusionary and possibly racist. These values mean that research into the population-environment nexus is inhibited.

Naive internationalists and social justice advocates have seized dominance over conservationists in the Greens and peak conservation bodies. She quoted Bill Lines:

From the time of their founding, the Greens have been a conflicted party. Internationalists and social justice advocates have vied for dominance over conservationists and as environmental conditions on the [Australian] continent worsened and knowledge of human impacts increased – the Greens adopted a passive attitude towards the population-environment debate, increasingly championed human rights and detached themselves from conservation.

Betts concluded with a plea for a population policy; in common with Withers, who holds the opposite view on a desirable level of population.

Peter McDonald is best known for his work on factors affecting fertility. He gave a resume of the world situation and he showed that government policy does influence fertility rates. Those developing countries that have introduced family planning, voluntary or involuntary, were prospering. Such policies were denounced by the Left as a capitalist plot or immoral by others. It was due to demographers and development economists that governments adopted policies which has slowed the population crisis. At a world level there is considerable interest in the population environment nexus among demographers. McDonald defended demographers as a discipline willing to conduct inter-disciplinary studies.

Australia has a natural rate of increase of 0.6% at the moment but this will decline as the demographic pattern changes and Australia will fall below replacement rate unless attitudes change. McDonald said that Australia had reported to UN that our policy was to maintain fertility at current levels.

[News to me, not widely publicised. Maybe the family packages are supporting this policy, not simply buying votes.]

 

 Public Policy

Kate Crowley looked at three Australian academic journals, concerned with political science, public management and environmental management. In them there was no discussion whatsoever of the population-environment debate. The same applied to an international journal on environmental politics. Some text books had a passing reference, but there were a few books which dealt with the subject.

 Crowley saw a mixed bunch opposing green theory. They were:

• libertarians who espouse individual freedom

• leftist multiculturalists who see population as a racist denial of the rights of would-be immigrants.

• eco-feminists who see population control as control of women by male power structures

• growth advocates who believe that population increase is the pathway to economic growth.

She believes the last group is the most influential.

  The Human Biologists

 

Tony McMichael and Robert Attenborough (not David of TV fame) were able to give plenty of examples of how over-population had destroyed isolated civilizations through over-exploitation of resources. Easter Island is an example recently given prominence on TV. However today it was more difficult to conduct such studies on a country due to trade. This usually meant an international, highly complex, study

Specific examples of environment affecting health, eg ozone depletion have been studied, but while all environment factors come back to affect health, it is difficult to relate research to the environment-population nexus. 

 

  The Spin Doctors

 

Lynton Crosby has worked for the Coalition on 12 federal elections. Surveys consistently show that people rate the environment as highly important, it does not mean that it will affect their vote. People vote on the values and motivations of the protagonists. There are four criteria for relevance:

 • general salience. The issue must have previously been part of the local, state, national, personal, future, social or consumer choice agenda

 • personal relevance for voters. The issue must have some real or immediately perceived positive or negative consequence for individuals

 • positionability or a point of differentiation. The issue must leverage its pre-existing positive or negative prejudices about the protagonists

 • decision salience. You must ensure that you relate what you are advocating to a vote for a candidate in a polling booth on election day, so by being decision relevant it is motivating to voters.

 

 

[For a long time environmentalists have had difficulty getting down to issues that affect people directly; too much broad brush. But now scarcity of water, land degradation, urban congestion etc, are becoming real issues which directly affect voters.]

Bruce Hawker has worked for many years in successful ALP State campaigns. He showed some of the results from polls.

 • 79% of people did not think we had done enough on the environment.

 • 50% agreed that further population growth in Australia will inevitably harm the environment.

To an unprompted question ‘Which is the most important environmental concern to you?

 • 29%  global warming

 • 22%  promoting clean air

 • 17% reducing salinity

 • 13% preventing tree clearing,

[Did Mark Latham know of this polling? Many hold that the forests policy was a loser everywhere.]

Hawker believes that environmental issues can be vote winners, He believes that the Greens will run into problems as they expand their platform to match a party with a substantial number of seats.

 

 The Journalists

 

Laura Tingle and Paul Kelly both maintained that in the media both population and environment get a fair run. However the subjects are covered by different journalists in all organization. The nexus between the two tends to fall between the gap. When an issue comes up on the political agenda it does get a good run. Journalists like a good debate to report on. Obviously they look for champions for quotes, essential on TV.

 

 Wind-up

 

In the conference windup Ian Lowe lamented having the economy separately debated in society, His preferred model has the economy as a subset of society and the latter as a subset of the environment. The model shows that automatically economic issues impact on the environment through society.

 Since it seems that we ought to be engaging with the task of developing a vision of a future Australia which sees a stabilized population, sustainability supported, it means we need to engage with the issue of defining a total target.

He picked up the point that the movement towards sustainability science argues that experts need to be engaging the broader community in defining the terms of the problem, in agreeing what is acceptable data, and in working towards solutions, because if we are making difficult social choices which do limit people’s opportunities, which do set boundaries, those choices will only be politically sustainable if they are owned by the community as a whole. So they can’t be handed down from the mountain by a group of experts; they need to be developed in concert with the wider community.