People involved in the environment movement have a lot to contend with. On one hand we are branded green extremists by the mainstream media, while at the same time a deep vein of conservatism runs through the movement that demonstrates it’s largely middle-class roots. Those conservative values reveal themselves in ethical conflicts around issues such as population, immigration, wilderness, indigenous rights, wild animal culling, technological quick fixes, waste and market environmentalism and a preference for working within the system. I’m going to examine some of those middle-class conservative themes and suggest how we might overcome them to reach a more compassionate, equitable and just environmental ethic. This is part one:

Population: blaming all people for everything

biofuelsIt may be a tired truism, but a family of twelve living in rural India do use less of the world’s resources than a yuppie couple in urban Melbourne. Yet some maintain that sheer numbers of human beings the source of all our environmental woes.

In 1968 Paul Erlich, a butterfly biologist, wrote The Population Bomb (he also founded the Zero Population Growth movement). In that book he described a scenario where population would outrun food production and cause a population crunch with devastating human impact in the hundreds of millions. He thought this crunch would come in the 1980s. He reviewed his predictions in 2004, noting that at that time as many as 600 million people were starving or malnourished. Erlich also made predictions about climate change and disease that he maintains were correct.

Did Erlichs predictions come true? Today the world is facing a food crisis: the cost of basic foods has doubled or more in many places, placing eating out of the range of many people in poverty, and adding to the huge numbers of starving people already in the world.

On the face of it, Erlich seems right. We do indeed have human-induced climate change, an increase of tropical diseases as a result and widespread starvation and malnutrition that numbers around two billion in 2008. In April the IMF issued a warning that civil unrest would soon result from current food shortages.

Erlich’s naysayers refer to the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture in the 1970s and genetic engineering as the negation of his predictions. Yet increases in production are not really what is at issue. Food shortages in the world today, as always, are not related to production shortages - rather they are the result of market manipulation, the greed of affluent nations and the many landless labourers. The global food market is hopelessly skewed. 80% of the world’s soy bean crop is fed to meat animals, biofuels have caused food grain crops to double in price. Today many places are growing fuel crops instead of food crops to sustain the affluent nations desire for an alternative to fossils fuels. Stock market speculators, after a quick profit, are now further inflating grain prices resulting in the price of rice reaching a 20 year high at US$850 a ton. So once again, we can see a food crisis is the direct result of unequal consideration of the interests of the wealthy. As an article in the New Statesman recently put it:

“What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world’s rich consumers….American cars now burn enough corn to cover all the import needs of the 82 nations classed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as “low-income food-deficit countries”. There could scarcely be a better way to starve the poor.” http://www.newstatesman.com/200804170025

No clearer indication of the unequal distribution of food in the world is the obesity epidemic in western nations: three quarters of people in the US and Australia are overfed or badly fed on junk. An evening bin-diving in any Australian suburban shopping centre reveals the extent of the wastage now perpetrated by food sellers. One evening I saw an entire skip filled with perfectly good cauliflower. The logic of such waste defies reason.

Social justice is vital to population, and this means giving women choices: not through punative laws like Chinas ‘one child policy’ or forced sterilization programmes that are so often linked to foreign aid. These progams assume that women in the two thirds world are ‘the problem’ and are unable to control themselves. The most successful and dramatic reductions in population have occurred where women’s rights have been attended to. Essentially, when women are valued, educated, have good health care for themselves and their families, have the right to own property, run business and live fulfilling lives outside of their reproductive role, they will choose to have less children. Indeed a study by UNICEF seems to support this when they observed that when women were not traumatised by the death of an infant, they were less likely to want large families.

Next time: Closing the borders

Sadly too many supporters of population control are also supporters of closing the borders to immigration…