You’d like to get rid of Australia’s European-style parks and gardens. Why?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to me those gardens of thirsty, introduced plants are an affront. Our sense of ourselves is defined by our environment. When people came here with European sensibilities, they were divorced from the Australian outback. They saw it as alien and ugly. The survival of Australia’s environment has depended on us slowly reconciling ourselves with it and accepting it as wonderful.
What would you have instead of those gardens?
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We need gardens with native species that are adapted to local conditions. In the north, there’s a whole suite of subtropical deciduous species to choose from. In Western Australia, there is the magnificent sand plain flora with its banksias and dryandras, and in the south-east snow gums. They are relics of the ice age. Native grasses and rushes in their own way are incredibly beautiful. You could even have a native lawn, although you would have to let it go brown in the summer. But gardens are largely symbolic—the real adaptations that need to occur are in agriculture, which is undergoing a profound revolution at the moment.
How?
Agriculture arrived in Australia as a totally European phenomenon. For the first few years, even coming to terms with the reversed seasons was a problem. But the biggest problems Australian producers still have are incredibly low soil fertility, and highly variable rainfall. Those two factors mean that for every kilogram of biological yield, you pay more, both in environmental terms and real dollar terms. Traditionally, we have been competing on the open market to sell bulk produce such as wheat and lamb. That’s just stupid. So what Australian agriculture has started to do is to concentrate on high-value, low-volume products. The wine industry is a great example.
Is it changing quickly enough?
Australians need to reduce their demand on the environment by 60 per cent to be living sustainably, according to studies by the CSIRO [Australia’s national research organisation]. At current levels of consumption, we can support a population of only 7 or 8 million sustainably, not the current 19 million. Unless things change it will become increasingly uneconomic to grow food because of the amount of fertiliser that you need, because of the costs of providing the infrastructure to deliver water, and because of the amount of remediation that you need to keep the environment intact. You can see it already with the salination problem in Western Australia.
Should immigrant Australians be learning about land management from Aborigines?
With Aboriginal cultures you’re looking at 45,000 years of co-evolution, and that’s a ruby beyond price. Once lost, we cannot recreate it. Aborigines have been here managing Australia since before the Ice Age. Europeans, on the other hand, have just 200 years of experience in that field.
How have European farming practices disrupted that?
In many ways. For example, when you have low-nutrient conditions, the tiniest input of energy can totally unbalance the system. So maintaining a constant supply of flour or meat can have a huge impact on traditional cultures.
You’ve suggested that Australia should have a population policy that is based on environmental constraints. Can you explain?
At the moment we have a de facto population policy based on the premise that Australia needs to increase its population. The business community is calling for more people—it wants as many as 50 million Australians by 2050. Where they got that figure from, who knows? The way to make a population policy work is to do the basic sums first. Let’s look at the economy, the social desires of the people and the environmental restraints and then set a population target. Once we’ve agreed on that, we can have informed immigration and government policies to increase or decrease birth rates. This gives you huge power in terms of tackling environmental problems. We can have more immigration as our environment improves. It’s up to the people whether they conserve resources or live profligately.
But aren’t you putting the environment before people, and isn’t that inherently racist?
To put the present generation before the environment is to harm future generations, so what you propose is a false dichotomy. Nations have to act individually because there is simply no mechanism to allow them to act at the global level, for instance to set up a global population policy. We have to take care of our own environment, and to make sure that when we reach out to non-Australians and deliver humanitarian relief we do it in the most effective way possible.
But isn’t it rather unfair? Most of us are recent immigrants to Australia, and now we’re going to pull the ladder up …
I don’t think you’ve got to pull the ladder up, because in almost every conceivable population policy you will have some immigration. Rather than focus on just immigration, we need to focus on how to get the best results for each dollar spent on providing better lives for non-Australians. But can Australia save the world? The answer is no.
Will you explain your claim that life in Australia has evolved to cooperate rather than compete?
There are a lot of birds in Australia, including kookaburras, blue wrens and magpies, in which some young adults forgo breeding in order to assist their parents in bringing up the young of the following year. This happens because the environment is so poor and there isn’t enough food for two adults to feed those chicks. With mammals it’s manifested differently. There is a little mouse-like marsupial called antechinus. For 10 months, the males grow, then for one month they just have sex. They forget to eat, and their bodies tear themselves apart. By the time the females give birth, there are no males left. There are so few resources that if the male survived, the female wouldn’t be able to provide for the young. It’s better for the male to die to get his genes into the next generation. It’s de facto cooperation.
What about Australian people?
Let’s look at indigenous people first. In most societies, initiation ceremonies are used to define the “in group”—bikers, for example, use them to make you one of the gang, to build cohesion within a group. But Aboriginal societies by and large have done the opposite, and used initiation ceremonies to build links between groups. In the Sydney area, for example, young boys from tribes north of the harbour would be sent south to be initiated by their enemies. The enemies would knock out the boys’ front teeth and keep them for several years, until they returned to the north with the teeth for another ceremony. You’d want to cooperate in Australia because you never know when you’ll have to go to your enemies for help because the environment is so variable. The same principle holds overseas. In North America in the 1930s, there was a very close correlation between low soil fertility and Communist Party presence. The most infertile areas are where you get cooperative behaviour. Poor environments push species towards cooperation; rich environments towards competition.
So the famous Aussie mateship evolved in the same way …
Australia was set up as a penal colony. Convicts stuck together or were hanged separately. By the 1890s, particularly in rural areas, there was a real sense of mateship. It was perhaps the first cultural shift Europeans made to adapt to life in Australia. You had to share resources at the worst of times—bush fires and that sort of thing. Cooperation is one of the few strategies open to large warm-blooded mammals, like people, that have a very high resource need and live in a very unpredictable climate. The flip side of mateship is the “tall poppy syndrome”—Australians tend to pull down somebody who is seen to be successful, to stop anybody from stepping outside the group. It infuriates Americans, who admire their great men and women.
How do you explain the stereotypical American personality?
North America is one of the richest continents. The soil is incomparably fertile. The British arrival was marked with the opening of a soil frontier that lasted 300 years. The frontier mentality got deeply embedded in American psyche—there were huge resources available and what was needed to unlock them was human energy. The resourceful, rugged individual was the man to admire. If the environment tended to push people together in Australia, in America it did the opposite.
Did the environment you were brought up in help shape your views?
Yes. When I was very young, we lived on the edge of Melbourne, with lots of wildlife. But the place was treated appallingly, the Yarra River was dead, the suburbs were marching on and the prettiest places around the bay were being treated as rubbish dumps.
But how did that change your views?
I found it an affront. I asked my parents why, and they said, “That’s progress.” I remember thinking, “How can it be progress to destroy everything?” Concern about conservation follows naturally from that.