Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (70 page)

insect pests and weeds, decreases herbicide and pesticide and synthetic fer
tilizer use, and yields more dietary protein and carbohydrate without in
creasing environmental damage. Encouraging signs in reafforestation are
the initiation of major tree plantations in 1978, and in 1998 the national
ban on logging and the start of the Natural Forest Conservation Program to reduce the risk of further destructive flooding. Since 1990, China has com-batted desertification on 15,000 square miles of land by reafforestation and fixation of sand dunes. The Grain-to-Green program, begun in 2000, gives
grain subsidies to farmers who convert cropland to forest or grassland, and
is thereby reducing the use of environmentally sensitive steep hillsides for
agriculture.

How will it all end up? Like the rest of the world, China is lurching between accelerating environmental damage and accelerating environmental
protection. China's large population and large growing economy, and its
current and historic centralization, mean that China's lurches involve more
momentum than those of any other country. The outcome will affect not
just China, but the whole world as well. While I was writing this chapter, I
found my own feelings lurching between despair at the mind-numbing
litany of depressing details, and hope inspired by the drastic and rapidly im
plemented measures of environmental protection that China has already
adopted. Because of China's size and its unique form of government, top-down decision-making has operated on a far larger scale there than any
where else, utterly dwarfing the impacts of the Dominican Republic's
President Balaguer. My best-case scenario for the future is that China's government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver
threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that
China's interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively
carried out, as its family planning policies.

CHAPTER
1 3

"Mining" Australia

Australia's significance
■ Soils ■ Water ■ Distance ■ Early history ■

Imported values
■ Trade and immigration ■ Land degradation ■

Other environmental problems
■ Signs of hope and change
■

M

ining in the literal sense
—i.e., the mining of coal, iron, and so on— is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of
its export earnings. In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament. That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do
not renew themselves with time, and hence to deplete those resources. Since
gold in the ground doesn't breed more gold and one thus has no need to
take account of gold renewal rates, miners extract gold from a gold lode as
rapidly as is economically feasible, until the lode is exhausted. Mining min
erals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources—such as
forests, fish, and topsoil—that do regenerate themselves by biological repro
duction or by soil formation. Renewable resources can be exploited indefi
nitely, provided that one removes them at a rate less than the rate at which
they regenerate. If however one exploits forests, fish, or topsoil at rates ex
ceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinc
tion, like the gold in a gold mine.

Australia has been and still is "mining" its renewable resources as if they
were mined minerals. That is, they are being overexploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present
rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and
iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renew
able but the latter aren't.

While many other countries today besides Australia are mining their en
vironments, Australia is an especially suitable choice for this final case study
of past and present societies, for several reasons. It is a First World country,
unlike Rwanda, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and China, but like the
countries in which most of the likely readers of this book live. Among First
World countries, its population and economy are much smaller and less

complex than are those of the U.S., Europe, or Japan, so that the Australian
situation is more easily grasped. Ecologically, the Australian environment is
exceptionally fragile, the most fragile of any First World country except per
haps Iceland. As a consequence, many problems that could eventually become crippling in other First World countries and already are so in some Third World countries
—such as overgrazing, salinization, soil erosion, introduced species, water shortages, and man-made droughts—have already
become severe in Australia. That is, while Australia shows no prospects of
collapsing like Rwanda and Haiti, it instead gives us a foretaste of problems
that actually will arise elsewhere in the First World if present trends con
tinue. Yet Australia's prospects for solving those problems give me hope and are not depressing. Then, too, Australia has a well educated populace, a high
standard of living, and relatively honest political and economic institutions
by world standards. Hence Australia's environmental problems cannot be
dismissed as products of ecological mismanagement by an uneducated, des
perately impoverished populace and grossly corrupt government and businesses, as one might perhaps be inclined to explain away environmental
problems in some other countries.

Still another virtue of Australia as the subject of this chapter is that it illustrates strongly the five factors whose interplay I have identified through
out this book as useful for understanding possible ecological declines or
collapses of societies. Humans have had obvious massive impacts on the
Australian environment. Climate change is exacerbating those impacts to
day. Australia's friendly relations with Britain as a trade partner and model
society have shaped Australian environmental and population policies. While modern Australia has not been invaded by outside enemies
—
bombed, yes, but not invaded—Australian perception of actual and poten
tial overseas enemies has also shaped Australian environmental and
population policies. Australia also displays the importance of cultural val
ues, including some imported ones that could be viewed as inappropriate to
the Australian landscape, for understanding environmental impacts. Per
haps more than any other First World citizens known to me, Australians are
beginning to think radically about the central question: which of our tradi
tional core values can we retain, and which ones instead no longer serve us
well in today's world?

A final reason for my choosing Australia for this chapter is that it's a country that I love, of which I have long experience, and which I can describe both from firsthand knowledge and sympathetically. I first visited
Australia in 1964, en route to New Guinea. Since then I have returned

dozens of times, including for a sabbatical at Australian National University
in Australia's capital city of Canberra. During that sabbatical I bonded to and imprinted on Australia's beautiful eucalyptus woodlands, which con
tinue to fill me with a sense of peace and wonder as do just two other of the
world's habitats, Montana coniferous forest and New Guinea rainforest. Australia and Britain are the only countries to which I have seriously considered emigrating. Thus, after beginning this book's series of case studies
with the Montana environment that I learned to love as a teenager, I wanted to close the series with another that I came to love later in my life.

For purposes of understanding modern human impacts on the Australian
environment, three features of that environment are particularly important:
Australian soils, especially their nutrient and salt levels; availability of fresh
water; and distances, both within Australia and also between Australia and
its overseas trading partners and potential enemies.

When one starts to think of Australian environmental problems,
the first thing that comes to mind is water shortage and deserts. In fact, Australia's soils have caused even bigger problems than has its water availability. Australia is the most unproductive continent: the one whose
soils have on the average the lowest nutrient levels, the lowest plant growth rates, and the lowest productivity. That's because Australian soils are mostly
so old that they have become leached of their nutrients by rain over the course of billions of years. The oldest surviving rocks in the Earth's
crust, nearly four billion years old, are in the Murchison Range of Western
Australia.

Soils that have been leached of nutrients can have their nutrient levels
renewed by three major processes, all of which have been deficient in Aus
tralia compared to other continents. First, nutrients can be renewed by vol
canic eruptions spewing fresh material from within the Earth onto the
Earth's surface. While this has been a major factor in creating fertile soils in
many countries, such as Java, Japan, and Hawaii, only a few small areas of eastern Australia have had volcanic activity within the last hundred million years. Second, advances and retreats of glaciers strip, dig up, grind up, and
redeposit the Earth's crust, and those soils redeposited by glaciers (or else
blown by the wind from glacial redeposits) tend to be fertile. Almost half of
North America's area, about 7 million square miles, has been glaciated
within the last million years, but less than 1% of the Australian mainland: just about 20 square miles in the southeastern Alps, plus a thousand square

miles of the Australian offshore island of Tasmania. Finally, slow uplift of
crust also brings up new soils and has contributed to the fertility of large
parts of North America, India, and Europe. However, again only a few small
areas of Australia have been uplifted within the last hundred million years,
mainly in the Great Dividing Range of southeastern Australia and in the
area of South Australia around Adelaide (map, p. 386). As we shall see, those
small fractions of the Australian landscape that have recently had their soils
renewed by volcanism, glaciation, or uplift are exceptions to Australia's
otherwise prevalent pattern of unproductive soils, and contribute dispro
portionately today to modern Australia's agricultural productivity.

The low average productivity of Australian soils has had major eco
nomic consequences for Australian agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Such nutrients as were present in arable soils at the onset of European agriculture quickly became exhausted. In effect, Australia's first farmers were inadver
tently mining their soils for nutrients. Thereafter, nutrients have had to be supplied artificially in the form of fertilizer, thus increasing agricultural
production costs compared to those in more fertile soils overseas. Low soil
productivity means low growth rates and low average yields of crops. Hence
a larger area of land has to be cultivated in Australia than elsewhere to ob
tain equivalent crop yields, so that fuel costs for agricultural machinery
such as tractors and sowers and harvesters (approximately proportional to
the area of land that must be covered by the machines) also tend to be rela
tively high. An extreme case of infertile soils occurs in southwestern
Australia, Australia's so-called wheat belt and one of its most valuable agricultural areas, where wheat is grown on sandy soils leached of nutrients and
essentially all nutrients must be added artificially as fertilizer. In effect, the
Australian wheat belt is a gigantic flowerpot in which (just as in a real
flowerpot) the sand provides nothing more than the physical substrate, and
where the nutrients have to be supplied.

As a result of the extra expenses for Australian agriculture due to disproportionately high fertilizer and fuel costs, Australian farmers selling to local
Australian markets sometimes cannot compete against overseas growers
who ship the same crops across the ocean to Australia, despite the added
costs of that overseas transport. For example, with modern globalization, it
is cheaper to grow oranges in Brazil and ship the resulting orange juice con
centrate 8,000 miles to Australia than to buy orange juice produced from Australian citrus trees. The same is true of Canadian pork and bacon com
pared to their Australian equivalents. Conversely, only in some specialized
"niche markets"
—i.e., crops and animal products with high added value