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In September 2005 mild mannered peace activist Scott Parkin was detained for 5 days by Australian Federal Police and then deported under John Howards anti-terrorist laws. Parkin was not told what he did to make him a ’security risk’ to Australia.

After an inquiry and two years later, ASIO was forced to admit that Parkin was deported after ‘foreign pressure’ was brought to bear by US interests, most likely then US Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was a board member of Halliburton, a company notorious for profiteering in Iraq. Parkin had been involved in anti-Halliburton activities in the US, particularly a propensity to dress up as a “Billionaire for Bombing Baghdad”. Hardly a security risk activity.

After Parkin’s detention and deportation, national protests were held all over Australia. 26 people wrote statutory declarations in Parkins defence, stating that he did not encourage, talk about or advocate any form of violent protest while in Australia. This directly contradicted the suggestions of then Attorney general Phillip Ruddock that Parkin advocated “politically motivated violence”.

In November 2007 Parkin was granted a court decision to be made cognizant of the reasons for his deportation, but those reasons still remain a public secret after an appeal by ASIO. In November 2007 peace advocates and friends of Parkin wrote their own ’security assessment’ “Where the bloody hell are you?”

Tracy Solum in San Francisco has made this great new film about the Parkin affair: “Deporting Democracy”

See also: Friends of Scott Parkin for more details

I interviewed Scott Parkin shortly after his deportation in 2005 [listen to mp3 here at radio4all.net]

Left: Hmmm. Did refugees escaping war cause this environmental destruction or was it a transnational mining corporation?

If we take on board the idea that increased population equals more environmental degradation (as discussed in the previous chapter in this series), then it is logical that we should also accept that increased immigration will have the same effect as increased reproduction within any one country. Advocates of immigration control in the environment movement in the 1970s argued that large numbers of refugees who were culturally and linguistically different were a not only a threat to the environment, but also their “way of life” and ushered in a decade of debate for strict immigration measures including Australia’s contentious refugee detention regime.

These arguments were used by the US’s Sierra Club, Americans for Immigration Control (AIC) and Zero Population Growth in the 1970s, and continue to this day. AIC’s website, revealing the uneasy association between nationalism, racism and immigration control, says immigration is “causing present-day patriots to question how many more this land can absorb and support with its diminishing natural resources, urban blight, overcrowded schools, and undereducated children”

Australia’s own population and immigration control advocates, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), maintain that, except for extreme humanitarian need, we should dramatically restrict immigration into Australia. Dr John Coulter, President of Sustainable Population Australia says there are better ways of helping the world’s 12–20 million refugees than bringing them to Australia. Coulter’s organisation blames immigrants for unemployment and housing prices as well as environmental degradation. Tim Flannery, populist Australia biologist and population control advocate says immigration is the easiest way to control problem population. They make the assumption, as discussed in part I, that there is a simple connection between numbers and loss of biodiversity.

Whatever the intended agenda of SPA, their position on immigration tends to align them with right wing or even racist organisations. The grotty side of immigration detention is accepted by SPA and their kind as a necessity to the higher end of preserving the abstract (and unattainable) notion of a pristine environment.

On the other side of this argument we find mostly humanitarian groups and but a few environmentalists. Most environmentalists are silent on the issue, or have fallen for the simplistic, isolationist idea that Australia is an ecological island as much as it is a national one. But this is no longer a reality in a world of global warming (if it ever was). The pro-immigration environmentalists rightly point out that Australia’s environmental woes are not the result of accepting refugees or immigrants, but of 200 years of mismanagement.

The “open borders” movement is a far left school of thought that advocates no border control and the free flow of people. They argue that the capitalist system itself it to blame for both environmental destruction and the notion of border control - because the free flow of money and business (no matter how ecologically irrational) is the accepted norm, and rich transnational corporations are not bound by border restrictions in the way people are. In practice this limits the free movement of workers and the poor, while enabling a very rich elite to do business where ever they like. People are thus less free and more controlled by immigration laws based entirely on their wealth, often at the price of their welfare. Those laws protect environmentally and inhumane practices, so let’s dump them.

Australia has behaved particularly reprehensibly on this count. Both Liberal and Labor governments have benefited from the political mileage they get from tapping into the most base racism in our society by advocating the incarceration of refugees and so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants. The paradigm of detention criminalises people in need, locking them up without just cause, psychologically damaging refugees and their children, who are often already the victims of torture, war or threat in the country they have fled. Hence the open border movement promotes the slogan “no one is illegal”. Certainly, where global issue like climate change are concerned, borders are meaningless. Australia can expect to feel the pressure of the 150 million environmental refugees, estimated by Norman Myers, to be created in our region due to climate change.

A notable exception to the environment movement’s acceptance of population control and reduced immigration is the position of Friends of the Earth Australia who note the importance of ‘fair share’:

Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emission rates of any industrialised nation on the planet, at about 26.7 tonnes per person per year (1). This is twice the average level of other wealthy countries (13.4 tonnes) and 25% higher than emissions per person in the United States (21.2 tonnes). Our energy intensive economy and lifestyle is typical of the developed world, which has been responsible for over 80% of all GHG emissions from human sources on the planet. Australia, with only 20 million people, produces around 1.1% of global emissions. Immigration, Population and Environment Friends of the Earth Australia position paper

FoEA emphasises that immigrants, refugees in particular, are not the cause of the threats to our environment, rather “existing land use, resource extraction, production and consumption patterns and infrastructure trends” are to blame.

At what human cost should environmentalists embrace population and immigration control? At the price of refusing the rights of people fleeing persecution, torture and war? As FoEA maintains, the environment movement must necessarily include the needs of the humans in it: and peaceful and just means that “show a commitment to tolerant democracy rather than being a product of a spurious application of an environmental analysis” are the only way to achieve that.

A good read: Cam Walkers article: Environmental Racism in Australia

Next time: Wilderness without people

Does it make sense, or is it even possible to advocate the preservation of wilderness? Is there a middle ground that can preserve the rights of nature and the rights of the human beings living in it?

yesterday Byron, Rick and Melinda faced Rocky court over actions taken against the US-Aust joint war games held at Shoalwater Bay in June 2007. Byron ‘did the hokey-pokey’ in the prohibited zone, while Rick and Melinda did a ‘make love not war’ action outside the gates :) all three were fined and Rick had a conviction recorded.

It’s not very often that you get tangible evidence that you made a difference to someone. byron credited a research paper i wrote in response to the army’s abysmal Public Environment Report as the inspiration for his actions. you can read said document here: FoEB response to PER [pdf]

what byron said in his speech was inspirational:

“Speeches had failed to stop the wargames. Marches had failed to stop the wargames. Letters to the government had failed to stop the wargames. In my mind, the only alternative left was for people en mass, to peacefully and physically place their whole selves in to the prohibited zone.

If thousands of people had marched, unified as one into the Shoalwater Bay Military Training area I believe the war games would have been stopped. The threat to endangered and vulnerable wildlife and the threat to the Australian environment would have ceased to exist.

What was going on within Shoalwater Bay during Operation Talisman Sabre 2007 was legal. Everything I was concerned about is allowable by law. The only option I saw to represent my concerns about what was happening and the legality of what was happening was to do in a court of law. The only way I could do that was to get arrested.”

more details of the bi-annual Peace Convergence protest actions: www.peaceconvergence.com

* the latest army-related gaffe in environmental management is the tragedy of the Belconnen kangaroos now being clumsily and cruelly culled outside canberra.  listen to this interview at ‘the wire’ www.thewire.org.au/daydetail.aspx?SearchDay=2008-05-21

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

It 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…