Credit: Brett Ryder
"Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth." – 2005 Millennium Assessment Report
WHY IS IT THAT a recent 0.25 per cent increase in interest rates in Australia got front-page coverage in our newspapers, yet last year, the most comprehensive report on the health of the world's ecosystems ever undertaken - the Millennium Assessment - was largely ignored?
I suspect the reason is that our institutions evolved at a time when the natural world seemed endless, and our focus was on managing the Industrial Revolution - not our natural environment.
The Industrial Revolution built the machines that liberated humanity. It also allowed us to produce and store vast quantities of food, and our population exploded. In the blink of an eye, we had lifted ourselves above Nature: 200 years ago, there were one billion people on the planet. Today there are six billion ... and growing.
The standard of living we enjoy today was created by the Industrial Revolution. In 1820, the average annual income of an Australian of European descent was less than A$3,000 in today's terms. In less than 200 years, we have increased that 15 times - and it's still growing.
We have more choices and more opportunity than any generation in history: health care, fast cars, shops full of food, universities, the 40-hour week, four weeks annual leave, sick leave, television, the Internet, cafés, dress shops … the list goes on.
We are without doubt, the wealthiest, healthiest and most educated generation in history. But this success has been at the cost of our natural world.
We have cleared half of the world's forests and we risk losing half of all species on Earth. If our global population grows to 9 billion people, as forecast, and the developing nations reach our current standard of living and our levels of consumption, we would need something like four Earths to support our civilisation.
The fossil fuels that are powering our machines are now changing the world's weather. We are in unchartered territory, where the Earth's climate may respond dramatically and unexpectedly and we are not prepared. In fact, we have no idea what it might do.
For countless generations, we have enjoyed the benefits of life on Earth for free. But now, as our planet becomes more congested, the free ride is over.
In the next century, our success will be determined, not by the Dow Jones Index or how many LCD TVs we own, but by the laws of nature and how we modify our behaviour to accommodate these laws. Currently, we don't have the systems in place to help us to do this.
Our parents invested in the economic future of their world with spectacular success. Now it is our turn: we must invest in the future of our natural world. We must put a value on our natural heritage, or we will lose it - and possibly take our civilisation with it. This is the great challenge of our generation.
Our parent's generation created a set of national accounts - like gross domestic product and balance of payments - to help them understand the economy better and make clearer economic decisions. Australia produced its first national accounts in 1946, and the rich nations' club - the 16-member OECD - created its first comparative set in 1954. These have been used to guide national economic decisions ever since.
Australia should now build a set of national accounts that measure environmental health as well as economic development. Sounds pretty difficult - but so did surviving the Great Depression and two world wars.
The challenge for science is to agree on the core set of indicators to guide environmental decisions, just as economists were able to agree on GDP, current accounts, inflation rates (even road tolls) - to guide economic and infrastructure decisions.
We should start by measuring five environmental assets: Environmental flows to keep rivers, wetland and estuaries healthy; vegetation along rivers and streams to connect the landscape and protect water quality; carbon in the atmosphere, which is causing climate change; salinity and the movement of ancient salts in the landscape; and habitat threatened native plants and animals need for survival.
We do know that humans will - individually and in groups - exploit our resources to maximise our personal wellbeing and comfort. That's what we do - it's what all living things do.
Can we rise above our programming and avoid a global 'tragedy of the commons'? I believe we can. Instead of making our civilisation history, we will change the course of it.
Peter Cosier is a director of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, an independent coalition interested in the long-term health of Australia's natural environment.
How can you call it Civilization?
You wrote:
Thank you for making me feel like a thing without a brain and no sense of community. Are you American? Anyway, all (the other) living things do not exploit nature erasing any future. They just expand they perceptions and offer them selfs as carriers of life.
Mauro Mazzerioli
Silent numbers indeed
I agree with Cosier. The profit and growth that we cite now as a measure of our economy's success, is not properly discounted for costs accrued to our natural resources. We exploit resources for immediate profit, yet we don't factor in - at all - what the cost of this behaviour is to future generations. Its a good idea that Cosier suggests, to alter our current indeces to acknowledge the long term ecological costs of, say, clearing forests, rather than simply measuring the immediate profit of the felled timber, as we do now.
Moreover, it is ironic that the first comment this article received reflects precicely the type of anthropocentric chauvinism that we need to overcome if we are to properly assess our place within the rest of the natural world.
Biodiversity Index
I agree with Cosier also. The idea of employing the successful indicators used by economists as a model for ecological indicators is good and could be expounded further. The reason the CPI is successful as an indicator for inflation is because it does not try to measure actual inflation (which is very difficult) but rather takes a defined subset of the items within an economy and uses changes in their price to infer changes in the prices of all the items in the economy. Another attribute that makes it successful is that inflation is actually a measure of change rather than an absolute. Indicators that are time based derivatives seem to be accepted and familiar to most people. Ecological indicators should also indicate change rather than absolutes.
One indicator that I would propose would be the biodiversity indicator. It would be measured by taking a subset of known species across all ecologies within a region. The percentage of the species lost within a unit of time (month/year/decade) would then be the biodiversity index. It would also permit comparative indicators between regions so that the affects of localised environmental efforts could be assessed. As with the CPI this indicator does not try and identify all the species within the region but infers that the losses outside the chosen subset match those within the measured group.
Add population increases to the accounting
I hear and read very little comment on the inevitable effects of population increase. If controlling population is in the too-hard basket, other measures can only delay the effects of competition for resources, and accumulated pollutants.
Overpopulation is taking us
Overpopulation is taking us towards an apocalypse, where we would be lucky to survive as a species. However, the measures needed to prevent or minimise this seem incredibly hard to set in motion. Widespread birth-control, and limits on food production, plus reversal of excess and cessation of plundering the planet are not traditional vote-winners.
Daniel Quinn's books and website articles explain the situation very clearly, but don't give any easy answers ( - there are no easy answers!)
Greetings, live long and prosper,
from Peter in Ireland
Widespread birth-control
How can we get widespread birth-control when Catholics and Muslims think that it is a sin.
When we are all starving they may see sense but why must I suffer because
of their crazy beliefs.