Ian Lowe

Ian Lowe's Australia on the Brink: Avoiding Environmental Ruin is a recent addition to the series In the National Interest, published by Monash University Publishing. I brought it home from the library a week ago and I read it yesterday because I was so cross about Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek's approval of yet another coal mine in Queensland, the third one so far this year. My fury was exacerbated when I read in today's The Saturday Paper that our emissions have gone up by 4.1 million tonnes compared to last year.

The federal government's legislated target is a 43 percent reduction by 2030, relative to 2005 levels. They should be tracking down by a couple of per cent each year; instead they just increased by 0.9 per cent in 12 months. (Mike Secombe, 'Australia's greenhouse emissions are still rising' in The Saturday Paper, Sept 2-8, 2023, no 465, p1.)

Back in the late 1980s, I first encountered Ian Lowe at a conference under the aegis of polymath, public intellectual and then Science Minister Barry Jones. Lowe was Director of the (now defunct) Commission for the Future in 1988 and the conference was rich in stimulating ideas, which guided my work in policy development in all the schools I worked in. I often quoted a key take-away which was that we were educating students for jobs that didn't yet exist, and that is as true today as it was in 1988.

And even back then Lowe was alert to the prospect of environmental crisis...

For readers who've been paying attention, much of Australia on the Brink will be familiar. Most of us know what our serious problems are:

• loss of our unique biodiversity;


• loss or degradation of productive land;


• the state of our inland rivers, especially the Murray-Darling system;


• pressures on the coastal zone from increasing population; and


• the release of increasing amounts of greenhouse gases contributing to global climate change. (p.2)

The question is, are we — individually and collectively — doing anything about them?

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/09/02/australia-on-the-brink-avoiding-environmenta...… (altro)

The irony about this book is that there isn't really a debate about the size of the Australian population. There may be mutterings in the pub about rapid population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, but seven years after the publication of Bigger or Better? Australia still doesn't have a population policy... though rel="nofollow" target="_top">this article argues that we don't need one.

My interest in this book was triggered by another book that I'm reading. I'm about half way through Tim Watts' recently published The Golden Country: Australia's Changing Identity and there's a fair bit in that about the impact on population of the Howard Government's changes to immigration policy, and how Australia has mostly fudged the question of population policy. More about that later when I've finished it, but it's been interesting to companion-read Lowe's book, even though some of it is now out of date.

Well, I remember this flurry about 'big Australia' but it's not a topic in the media at the moment. There seem to be two reasons for this: one is that the nexus between population growth and economic growth is 'settled' dogma, and the other is that it's a complex subject easily subverted into prejudice about migration. Lowe's book is useful for clarifying the issues, and it appears to me to be reasonably even-handed, but he is upfront about being a patron of Sustainable Population Australia so it's clear where his opinion lies.

The book consists of a brief history of population growth in Australia, tracing the years when it was generally accepted that Australia needed to grow its population, through to the early 1970s where there began to be world-wide concern about the earth's capacity to support an ever-increasing global population. But nothing much happened. Then there was another flurry in the 1990s but immigration and the national birth rate went on increasing under the Howard government's policies anyway.

There's a longish chapter about the economic arguments for and against, most of which suggest that we've been led up the garden path about the benefits of population growth—but what I found most interesting of all was the chapter titled 'Who's Who in the Population Debate, and What are their Agendas.' Whether it's intended to or not, this chapter goes a long way to explaining why in fact there is so little discussion about the future of our population. It's very complicated indeed.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/11/14/bigger-or-better-australias-population-debat...… (altro)