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    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?
    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?
    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?
    Ebook149 pages3 hours

    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?

    By Tim Flannery

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    Sometime this century, after 4 billion years, some of Earth's regulatory systems will pass from control through evolution by natural selection, to control by human intelligence. Will humanity rise to the challenge?

    This landmark essay by Tim Flannery is about sustainability, our search for it in the twenty-first century, and the impact it might have on the environmental threats that confront us today. Flannery discusses in detail three potential solutions to the most pressing of the sustainability challenges: climate change. He argues that Australia has a special responsibility when it comes to climate change, and that our prime minister could be a critical player on the global stage in Copenhagen in December 2009 - but only if we take swift and effective action and make sharp cuts in emissions. Brilliant and terrifying, Now or Never is a call to arms by Australia's leading thinker and writer on the natural world.

    "Throughout the latter part of 2007 and into 2008, I found it increasingly hard to read the scientific findings on climate change without despairing ... I think that there is now a better than even chance that, despite our best efforts, in the coming two or three decades Earth's climate system will pass the point of no return." —Tim Flannery, Now Or Never
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2008
    ISBN9781921825309
    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?
    Author

    Tim Flannery

    Professor TIM FLANNERY is a leading writer on climate change. A Scientist, an explorer and a conservationist, Flannery has held various academic positions including Professor at the University of Adelaide, Director of the South Australian Museum and Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum. A frequent presenter on ABC Radio, NPR and the BBC, he has also written and presented several series on the Documentary Channel. His books include Here on Earth and the international number one bestseller The Weather Makers. Flannery was named Australian of the Year in 2007.

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    • 4/5
      Some good essays, but I preferred The Weathermakers.
    • 4/5
      This pretty much starts out with some Gaia-speak that comes close to justifying the good Cardinal Pell's occasional assertions that the environmental movement is a form of neo-paganism: human beings collectively form the brain of Gaia and the purpose of our existence is to bring consciousness to her processes. (Actually, that's pretty close to how I understand things, only I'd prefer less theological ways of expressing it.) Theology out of the way, the essay has an unflinching look at the dire state of the Earth, and the urgency of the challenge from global warming. It argues that what is actually missing is vision, political will and leadership to rise to the challenges, and puts forward a number of hope-inducing proposals and examples, ranging from farming approaches that have already been tried and found extraordinarily effective in reducing greenhouse emissions to a possibly mad but nonetheless enticing vision of a new city, to be called Geothermia, near the Cooper Basin in South Australia, which would potentially supply all Australia's energy needs from environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral thermal.I started the essay expecting to be plunged into gloom and despair. Instead, I find I'm left with something approaching optimism about our chances.As always, a fair proportion of this issue (39 of its 106 pages) is taken up with correspondence about the last one. Given that Nº 30, Paul Toohey's Last Drinks, could reasonably be described as having attacked a number of public figures, it's striking that only of those figures, Rex Wild, has taken up the right of reply and he doesn't address Toohey's central, scathing criticisms of the Little Children Are Sacred report, of which he was co-author, but restricts himself to defending the aspersions cast on his behaviour as director of the NT Office of Public Prosecutions. He says near the start of his piece, 'I have been hesitant in accepting the editor's invitation to respond to Paul's essay as, among other things, I see he has a right of reply.' What on earth does that mean? And does it in some way account for the resounding silence from all the others, including the Aboriginal leaders repeatedly characterised (arguably defamed) in this correspondence as proponents of victimology. I find the whole thing baffling and disturbing, even more so given that Toohey's reply consists of nine lines, including this: 'My view is that I've had my go and now it is over to those who want to have their say to have it.' Hopefully QE #32 will resolve some of this.
    • 3/5
      Thought provoking to say the least!

    Book preview

    Quarterly Essay 31 Now or Never - Tim Flannery

    Quarterly Essay

    Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by

    Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd.

    Publisher: Morry Schwartz.

    ISBN 978-1-86395-271-2 ISSN 1832-0953

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    CONTENTS

    NOW OR NEVER

    A Sustainable Future for Australia?

    Tim Flannery

    CORRESPONDENCE

    John van Tiggelen, Larissa Behrendt, Peter Sutton, Rex Wild, Peggy Dwyer,

    Julie James Bailey, Kim Mahood, Paul Toohey

    Contributors

    NOW OR

    NEVER

    A Sustainable Future

    for Australia ?

    Tim Flannery

    IN THE YEAR FOUR BILLION

    We succeeded in taking that picture, and if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

    —Carl Sagan, 11 May 1996

    The image that moved Carl Sagan to such poetic magnificence was taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990. The vessel was 4 billion miles from home – a mile for every year of Earth’s existence – when it captured that image, and in it Earth is nothing more than a minute blue dot, all but lost in the immensity of the cosmos. At the time Sagan described our home so beautifully he had just half a trip round the sun – six months – to live; and he well knew that the mote of dust that carried him on his life journey is an extraordinary place – for it is the only living planet we know of in all the vastness of the universe.

    With the twenty-first century less than a decade old, Sagan’s description resonates more powerfully than ever. Our despoliation of Earth’s life-support systems seems to mark us destroyer of our own civilisations, and as the planetary crisis we have created deepens, it is certain that no saviour will arise to rescue us from ourselves. There is no real debate about how serious our predicament is: all plausible projections indicate that over the next forty to ninety years humanity will exceed – in all probability by around 100 per cent – the capacity of Earth to supply our needs, thereby greatly exacerbating the risk of widespread starvation, or of being overwhelmed by our own pollution. The most credible estimates indicate that we are already exceeding Earth’s capacity to support our species (termed its biocapacity) by around 25 per cent. With global food security at an all-time low, and greenhouse gases so choking our atmosphere as to threaten a global climate catastrophe, the signs of what may come are all around us.

    Everyone knows what the solution is: we must begin to live sustainably.

    But what does that actually mean? Sustainability is a word that can mean almost anything to anyone. Whether used by cosmetics advertisers or fruit sellers, it is bandied about as if it were the essence of virtue. Yet so recent is the word that my spellcheck doesn’t recognise it.

    That increasingly authoritative fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, defines sustainability as a characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely. Hardly a moral definition, this, or indeed – in light of the second law of thermodynamics – a feasible one. Many environmentalists opt for a more practical meaning: living in such a way as not to detract from the potential quality of life of future generations. And here we find a definition in harmony with the commonly voiced aspiration to try to leave the world a better place than we found it. This essay is in part an inquiry into the causes of our common failure to realise this heartfelt desire – even though it is one shared by almost every individual on Earth.

    If we accept the environmentalists’ definition, living sustainably does not involve any particular morality beyond extending the Eighth Commandment (Thou shalt not steal) to future generations. A society that limited itself to such a narrow aspiration could be a barbarous place. Why worry about the distribution of wealth? Why waste a corpse? Any meaningful inquiry into sustainability must surely be broader than this, and thus be as much a philosophical and moral discussion as a scientific one; for sustainability pertains to us – our innate needs and desires – as much as it does to the workings and capacities of our planet. A real search for sustainability involves a broad vision – indeed, it encompasses many flashpoint issues: is there space for meat eating in a sustainable world, for example? And what of animal rights – and human rights – and religion, and democracy, and the free market, and war? While a detailed look at how these issues could be squared with a fully sustainable future is far beyond the scope of this essay, such questions will continually arise as we examine clear, practical solutions to our most urgent problems.

    Where does science fit into this inquiry? In human affairs there is often a great difference between aspiration and achievement. Even a society possessed of a moral and philosophical framework ideally suited to attaining a sustainable future may fail to do so if it lacks knowledge of how the world works, and of how its practices and technology are affecting Earth’s life-support systems. Accurate scientific knowledge of Earth and its processes is vital to the pursuit of sustainability. And so I propose commencing this investigation with two questions, which, even if they cannot be definitively answered, can nevertheless guide us in our search. What is our purpose as a species? And how does Earth work?

    The wellsprings from which we derive meaning in our lives are intensely personal. My own search for meaning has led me to the belief that this generation – those of us living at the dawn of the twenty-first century – is destined to achieve an extraordinary transformation, one unique in the 4-billion-year history of Earth, and one which will influence the fate of life from now on. Geologists talk of the dawning of a new geological period called the Anthropocene, which is characterised by pervasive human influence on Earth processes. But perhaps the Anthropocene will truly have dawned when humanity uses its intelligence to help regulate those processes for the good of Earth as a whole.

    It is the great complexity and order created by evolution through natural selection that has led to the existence of Gaia: Earth conceived of as a self-regulating, evolving system. James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, illustrated the concept by showing how Earth as a whole maintains the temperature of the planet’s surface within bounds that are conducive to life, and recycles nutrients and regulates the chemistry of the oceans to the same end. In short, life keeps the atmosphere and oceans out of balance with Earth’s rocks in a way that permits life to flourish. The Gaia hypothesis is a way of describing how our living planet as a whole works.

    We have long understood – from biblical teaching and practical experience – that we are naught but earth: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as the English burial service puts it. Indeed, Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19) are among the oldest written words to have come down to us. Yet while we have long understood that we are earth, it is equally true, but almost never said, that we are Earth as well. We are Earth by virtue of the fact that every one of us has been shaped by the process of evolution through natural selection: it’s that process which spawns the exceedingly complex and highly ordered structures known as life and its ecosystems. And this has a profound implication: Earth was not made for us, rather we were made for this Earth.

    This realisation of our purpose is at odds with some of the most powerful currents in our Western civilisation, including the Christian tradition I grew up in. In fact, it is diametrically opposed to them, for it asserts that we are evolved to serve Earth, and that our great and distinguishing characteristic – our intelligence – is not ours alone, but Gaia’s as well, and is destined to be used by Gaia for her own purposes. James Lovelock took the name Gaia from the ancient Greeks: it was their term for the earth goddess. I believe that over the course of the twenty-first century we will again come to serve our Earth goddess, perhaps even to revere her.

    Looking at the current state of Earth, you might be tempted to see humanity as an enemy of Gaia, but to do so would be a mistake. We are self-evidently part of Gaia, and, just as self-evidently, as animals in the Gaian system we must kill (even if we kill only vegetable matter) in order to survive. Gaia is all about the giving, taking and reprocessing of life. Perceiving ourselves as outside of and antagonistic to Gaia is, I believe, a terrible mistake, for to do so leads us to consider actions necessary for our survival to be somehow wrong. As animals we must eat, and that means taking life. Striving for a bloodless, painless world of pristine morality and zero impact on nature is delusional. Even more importantly, it blinds us to what I believe is the true purpose, according to the Gaian perspective, of our existence.

    I believe that the deepest significance of the twenty-first century can be glimpsed in the hierarchical structure of life on Earth. Here lies the potential for sustainability and the transformation of our existence. Guided by evolution, the history of life has been one of increasing complexity and increasing efficiency. The eminent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that life has not increased in overall complexity

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