2004 Fenner Conference on the Environment: understanding the population - environment debate: bridging disciplinary divides

 

Hosted by the Australian Academy of Science on 24-25 May as part of its 50 year celebrations.

 

The conference highlighted many important issues, particularly that the disciplinary divide remains an important barrier to solving the complex problems of society in an integrated fashion. There was a clear call that Australia must join the growing global momentum to bridge this divide. There were so many insightful speakers. The delivery was often cutting edge – and brought together outstanding contributions from philosophers, economists, demographers, scientists….reading the proceedings and transcripts is a truly enlightening experience (http://www.science.org.au/proceedings/fenner/index.htm). A selection of excerpts -

 

Professor Julie Thompson Klein, an interdisciplinary expert from Wayne State University in the US and plenary speaker at the conference, said that in Europe, Canada, and the United States, interdisciplinary approaches in both research and education are promoting greater collaboration and integration among the professions and among government sectors. Some of the major impediments to greater cross-disciplinary activity in Australia related to institutional structure in our education systems, and a lack of incentive for multi-disciplinary projects in the research funding process.

 

This was supported by Associate Professor Katherine Betts but who also warned about the scarcity of extrinsic rewards. “People who step outside their disciplinary boundaries can find it hard to publish, and hard to produce work that is recognised by gate keepers in their profession. I don’t want to overstate this. Bob Birrell and I founded People and Place in 1993 largely to provide an outlet for academic work on the population/environment nexus. We have indeed from time to time received (or canvassed for) good work on this topic, but it has not rained down upon us. But even though we offer a friendly editorial reception to good, empirical work with an environmental focus, we are only one journal. If a young person wants to get ahead in an academic career, interdisciplinary work is risky. There are also more tangible risks in the new economic climate for universities. People who might have thought that they were going to devote themselves to research and teaching now find they have to earn money too. Research grants from outside bodies, including government agencies, are one way to do this. For demographers this includes doing contract work for government agencies. People who are critical of the environmental consequences of government strategies, such as the growth plans embodied in Steve Brack’s Melbourne 2030 report are, it is said, well advised to keep quiet about it.”

 

Also, a must-read is the transcript from Phillip Toyne’s (Ecofutures) dinner speech (http://www.science.org.au/proceedings/fenner/toyne.htm), particularly the following chilling tale.

 

“Let me recount a cautionary tale about what might happen if we get this wrong. Professor Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and Professor of Physiology at UCLA, spoke last year of the causes for the collapses of ancient societies, and identified five causes, acting together or alone. One was environmental damage, and he used as an example Easter Island which is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world, in the Pacific, 2000 miles west of the coast of Chile, and 1300 miles from the nearest Polynesian island. Polynesians came from the west, around AD800, settled it and it was so remote that after they arrived at Easter Island, nobody else arrived and no-one left so the story is uncomplicated by relations with outsiders. There weren’t any. Easter Islanders rose and fell by themselves. The Island has a relatively fragile environment, with only 40 inches of rain per year. It’s most famous because of the giant stone statutes - weighing up to 80 tons. They were carved in a volcanic quarry and then dragged up over the lip of the quarry and then 13 miles down to the coast and raised up vertically onto platforms. All this was accomplished by people without any draught animals, without pulleys, without machines. And yet when Europeans arrived at Easter in 1722, the islanders were in the process of throwing down the statues, the Island society was in a state of collapse.

 

Easter Islanders were typical Polynesians, and the cause of the collapse became clear in the last 15 years, particularly from palaeobotanical work and identification of animal bones in archaeological sites. Today Easter Island is barren. It’s grassland, there are no native trees whatsoever on Easter Island. It’s not a likely setting for the developmentof a great civilisation, but studies identifying pollen grains and lake cores show that when the Polynesians arrived at Easter Island, a tropical forest that included the world’s largest palm tree and dandelions of tree height covered it. And there were at least six species of land birds, 37 species of sea birds - the largest collection of sea birds anywhere in the Pacific.

 

 

 

When the Polynesians settled Easter, they began to clear the forest for their gardens, for firewood, for using as rollers and levers to raise the giant statues, and then to build canoes with which to go out into the ocean and catch porpoises and tuna. In the oldest archaeological sites, one sees the bones of porpoises and tuna that the people were eating. They ate the land birds, they ate the sea birds, and they ate the fruits of the palm trees. The population of Easter grew to an estimated 10,000 people, until by the year 1600 all of the trees and all of the land birds and all but one of the sea birds on Easter Island itself were extinct. Some of the sea birds were confined to breeding on offshore stacks.

 

 

The deforestation and the elimination of the birds had consequences for people. First without trees, they could no longer transport and erect the statues, so they stopped carving statues. Secondly, without trees they had no firewood except of their own agricultural wastes. Thirdly, without trees to cover the ground, they suffered from soil erosion and hence agricultural yields decreased, and then without trees they couldn’t build canoes, so they couldn’t go out to the ocean to catch porpoises, there were only a few sea birds left.

 

Because they didn’t have pigs, the largest animal left to eat after the disappearance of porpoises and tuna were humans. And Polynesian society then collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism. The spear points from that final phase still litter the ground of Easter Island today. The population crashed from about 10,000 to an estimated 2000 with no possibility of rebuilding the original society because the trees, most of the birds and some of the soil were gone.

 

Diamond rightly thinks that one of the reasons that the collapse of Easter Island so grabs people is that it looks like a metaphor for us today. Easter Island, isolated in the middle of the Pacific Island, nobody to turn to for help, nowhere to flee once Easter Island itself collapsed. In the same way today, one can look at Planet Earth in the middle of the galaxy and if we too get into trouble, there’s no way that we can flee, and no people to whom we can turn for help out there in the galaxy.

 

He finished by wondering what the Islander who chopped down the last palm tree said as he or she did it. Was he saying, ‘ Do we care more for trees than for our jobs?’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘What about my private property rights? Get the big government off my back.’ Or maybe he was saying, ‘You’re predicting environmental disaster, but your environmental models are untested, we need more research before we can take action.’ Or perhaps he was saying, ‘Don’t worry, technology will solve all our problems.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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