Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (71 page)

beyond ordinary growing costs, such as wine
—can Australian farmers com
pete successfully in overseas markets.

A second economic consequence of low Australian soil productivity involves agroforestry, or tree agriculture, as discussed for Japan in Chapter 9.
In Australian forests most of the nutrients are actually in the trees them
selves, not in the soils. Hence when the native forests that the first European settlers encountered had been cut down, and when modern Australians had either logged the regrowing natural forests or invested in agroforestry by establishing tree plantations, tree growth rates have been low in Aus
tralia compared to those in other timber-producing countries. Ironically,
Australia's leading native timber tree (the blue gum of Tasmania) is now
being grown more cheaply in many overseas countries than in Australia
itself.

The third consequence surprised me and may surprise many readers.
One doesn't immediately think of fisheries as dependent on soil produc
tivity: after all, fish live in rivers and in the ocean, not in soils. However, all
of the nutrients in rivers, and at least some of those in oceans near the
coastline, come from the soils drained by the rivers and then carried out
into the ocean. Hence Australia's rivers and coastal waters are also relatively
unproductive, with the result that Australia's fisheries have been quickly mined and overexploited like its farmlands and its forests. One Australian
marine fishery after another has been overfished to the point of becoming
uneconomic, often within just a few years of the fishery's discovery. Today,
out of the nearly 200 countries in the world, Australia has the third-largest
exclusive marine zone surrounding it, but it ranks only 55th among the
world's countries in the value of its marine fisheries, while the value of its
freshwater fisheries is now negligible.

A further feature of Australia's low soil productivity is that the problem was not perceptible to the first European settlers. Instead, when they encountered magnificent extensive woodlands that included what may have been the tallest trees in the modern world (the blue gums of Victoria's Gippsland, up to 400 feet tall), they were deceived by appearances into
thinking that the land was highly productive. But after loggers had removed
the first standing crop of trees, and after sheep had grazed the standing crop
of grass, the settlers were surprised to discover that trees and grass grew
back very slowly, that the land was agriculturally uneconomic, and that in
many areas it had to be abandoned after farmers and pastoralists had made
big capital investments in building homes, fences, and buildings and making other agricultural improvements. From early colonial times continuing

until today, Australian land use has gone through many such cycles of land
clearance, investment, bankruptcy, and abandonment.

All those economic problems of Australian agriculture, forestry, fish
eries, and failed land development are consequences of the low productivity of Australian soils. The other big problem of Australia's soils is that in many
areas they are not only low in nutrients but also high in salt, from three
causes. In southwestern Australia's wheat belt the salt in the ground arises from its having been carried inland over the course of millions of years by sea breezes off the adjacent Indian Ocean. In southeastern Australia, Australia's other area of most productive farmland rivaling the wheat belt, the
basin of Australia's largest river system, the Murray and Darling Rivers, lies
at low elevations and has been repeatedly inundated by the sea and then
drained again, leaving much of the salt behind. Still another low-lying basin
in Australia's inland was formerly filled by a freshwater lake that did not drain to the sea, became salty by evaporation (like Utah's Great Salt Lake
and Israel's and Jordan's Dead Sea), and eventually dried out, leaving behind salt deposits that became carried by winds to other parts of eastern
Australia. Some Australian soils contain more than 200 pounds of salt per square yard of surface area. We shall discuss later the consequences of all that salt in the soil: briefly, they include the problem that the salt is easily
brought to the surface by land clearance and irrigation agriculture, resulting
in salty topsoils in which no crop can grow (Plate 28). Just as Australia's first
farmers, without modern analyses of soil chemistry, could not be aware of
the nutrient poverty of Australian soils, they similarly could not be aware
of all that salt in the ground. They could no more anticipate the problem of
salinization than of nutrient depletion resulting from agriculture.

Whereas the infertility and salinity of Australia's soils were invisible to the
first farmers and are not well known outside Australia among the lay public today, Australia's water problems are obvious and familiar, such that "desert" is the first association of most people overseas to mention of the
Australian environment. That reputation is justified: a disproportionately
large fraction of Australia's area has low rainfall or is extreme desert where
agriculture would be impossible without irrigation. Much of Australia's area
remains useless today for any form of agriculture or pastoralism. In those areas where food production is nevertheless possible, the usual pattern is
that rainfall is higher near the coast than inland, so that as one proceeds inland one first encounters farmland for growing crops, plus half of

Autralia's cattle maintained at high stocking rates; farther inland, sheep sta
tions; still farther inland, cattle stations (the other half of Australia's cattle,
maintained at very low stocking rates), because it remains economic to raise cattle in areas with lower rainfall than sheep; and finally, still farther inland,
the desert where there is no food production of any sort.

A more subtle problem with Australia's rainfall than its low average val
ues is its unpredictability. In many parts of the world supporting agricul
ture, the season in which rain falls is predictable from year to year:
for example, in Southern California where I live, one can be virtually cer
tain that whatever rain falls will be concentrated in the winter, and that there will be little or no rain in the summer. In many of those produc
tive overseas agriculture areas, not only rain's seasonality but also its occur
rence is relatively reliable from year to year: major droughts are infrequent, and a farmer can go to the effort and expense of plowing and planting each
year with the expectation that there will be enough rain for that crop to
mature.

Over most of Australia, however, rainfall depends upon the so-called
ENSO (the El Nino Southern Oscillation), which means that rain is unpre
dictable from year to year within a decade, and is even more unpredictable
from decade to decade. The first European farmers and herders to settle in
Australia had no way of knowing about Australia's ENSO-driven climate,
because the phenomenon is difficult to detect in Europe, and it is only
within recent decades that it has become recognized even by professional
climatologists. In many areas of Australia the first farmers and herders had the misfortune to arrive during a string of wet years. Hence they were de
ceived into misjudging the Australian climate, and they commenced raising
crops or sheep in the expectation that the favorable conditions greeting
their eyes were the norm. In fact, in most of Australia's farmlands the rain
fall is sufficient to raise crops to maturity in only a fraction of all years: not more than half of all years at most locations, and in some agricultural areas
only in two years out of 10. That contributes to making Australian agricul
ture expensive and uneconomic: the farmer goes to the expense of plowing and sowing, and then in half or more of years there is no resulting crop. An
additional unfortunate consequence is that, when the farmer plows the ground and plows underground whatever cover of weeds has sprung up
since the last harvest, bare soil becomes exposed. If the crops that the farmer
then sows do not mature, the soil is left bare, not even covered by weeds, and thus exposed to erosion. Thus, the unpredictability of Australia's rain-

fall makes growing crops more expensive in the short run, and increases erosion in the long run.

The principal exception to Australia's ENSO-driven pattern of unpre
dictable rain is the wheat belt of its southwest, where (at least until recently)
the winter rains came reliably from year to year, and where a farmer could
count on a successful wheat crop almost every year. That reliability pro
pelled wheat within recent decades to overtake both wool and meat as Australia's most valuable agricultural export. As already mentioned, that wheat belt also happens to be the area with particularly extreme problems of low soil fertility and high salinity. But global climate change in recent years has been undermining even that compensating advantage of predictable winter
rains: they have declined dramatically in the wheat belt since 1973, while in
creasingly frequent summer rains there fall on harvested bare ground and
cause increased salinization. Thus, as I mentioned for Montana in Chap
ter 1, global climate change is producing both winners and losers, and Aus
tralia will be a loser even more than will Montana.

Australia lies largely within the temperate zones, but it lies thousands of miles overseas from other temperate-zone countries that are potential ex
port markets for Australian products. Hence Australian historians speak of
the "tyranny of distance" as an important factor in Australia's development.
That expression refers to the long overseas ship journeys making transport
costs per pound or per unit of volume for Australian exports higher than
for exports from the New World to Europe, so that only products with low
bulk and high value could be exported economically from Australia. Origi
nally in the 19th century, minerals and wool were the main such exports.
Around 1900, when refrigeration of ship cargo became economic, Australia
also began to export meat overseas, particularly to England. (I recall an
Australian friend who disliked the British, and who worked in a meat-processing factory, telling me that he and his mates occasionally dropped a
gallbladder or two into boxes of frozen liver marked for export to Britain,
and that his factory defined "lamb" as a sheep under six months old if it was destined for local consumption, but defined it as any sheep up to 18 months
old if it was destined for export to Britain.) Today, Australia's principal ex
ports remain low-bulk, high-value items, including steel, minerals, wool, and wheat; increasingly within the last few decades, wine and macadamia
nuts as well; and also some specialty crops that are bulky but that have high

value because Australia produces unique crops aimed at specialty niche markets for which some consumers are willing to pay a premium, such as durum wheat and other special wheat varieties, and wheat and beef raised
without pesticides or other chemicals.

But there is an additional tyranny of distance, one within Australia itself.
Australia's productive or settled areas are few and scattered: the country has
a population only V14 that of the U.S., scattered over an area equal to that of
the U.S.'s lower 48 states. The resulting high costs of transportation within Australia make it expensive to sustain a First World civilization there. For
example, the Australian government pays for telephone connection to the
national phone grid for any Australian home or business at any location
within Australia, even for outback stations hundreds of miles from the
nearest such station. Today, Australia is the most urbanized country in the
world, with 58% of its population concentrated in just five large cities (Syd
ney with 4.0 million people, Melbourne 3.4 million, Brisbane 1.6 million, Perth 1.4 million, and Adelaide 1.1 million as of 1999). Among those five
cities, Perth is the world's most isolated large city, lying farther than any
other from the next large city (Adelaide, 1,300 miles to the east). It is no ac
cident that two of Australia's largest companies, its national airline Qantas
and its telecommunications company Telstra, are based on bridging those
distances.

Australia's internal tyranny of distance, in combination with its
droughts, is also responsible for the fact that banks and other businesses are closing their branches in Australia's isolated towns, because those branches
have become uneconomic. Doctors are leaving those towns for the same
reason. As a result, whereas the U.S. and Europe have a continuous distri
bution of settlement sizes
—large cities, medium-sized towns, and small
villages—Australia is increasingly without medium-sized towns. Instead,
most Australians today live either in a few large cities with all the amenities
of the modern First World, or in smaller villages or else outback stations
without banks, doctors, or other amenities. Australia's small villages of a few
hundred people can survive a five-year drought, such as arises often in Aus
tralia's unpredictable climate, because the village has so little economic ac
tivity anyway. Big cities can also survive a five-year drought, because they
integrate the economy over a huge catchment area. But a five-year drought
tends to wipe out medium-sized towns, whose existence depends on their ability to provide enough business branches and services to compete with more distant cities, but which aren't big enough to integrate over a huge catchment. Increasingly, most Australians don't depend on or really live in