Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (72 page)

the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.

Europe claimed most of its overseas colonies in hopes of financial gain or supposed strategic advantages. Locations of those colonies to which many
Europeans actually emigrated
—i.e., excluding trading stations where only
relatively few Europeans settled in order to trade with the local population—
were chosen on the basis of the land's perceived suitability for the successful
founding of an economically prosperous or at least self-supporting society.
The unique exception was Australia, whose immigrants for many decades
arrived not to seek their fortunes but because they were compelled to go
there.

Britian's principal motive for settling Australia was to relieve its festering
problem of large numbers of jailed poor people, and to forestall a rebellion
that might otherwise break out if they could not somehow be disposed of.
In the 18th century British law prescribed the death penalty for stealing 40
shillings or more, so judges preferred to find thieves guilty of stealing 39
shillings in order to avoid imposing the death penalty. That resulted in pris
ons and moored ship hulks filling with people convicted of petty crimes
such as theft and debt. Until 1783, that pressure on the available jail space
was relieved by sending convicts as indentured servants to North America, which was also being settled by voluntary emigrants seeking improvement
of their economic lot or else religious freedom.

But the American Revolution cut off that escape valve, forcing Britain to
seek some other place to dump its convicts. Initially, the two leading candi
date locations under consideration were either 400 miles up the Gambia
River in tropical West Africa, or else in desert at the mouth of the Orange River on the boundary between modern South Africa and Namibia. It was
the impossibility of both of those proposals, evident on sober reflection,
that led to the fallback choice of Australia's Botany Bay near the site of mod
ern Sydney, known at the time only from Captain Cook's visit in 1770. That
was how the First Fleet brought to Australia in 1788 its first European settlers, consisting of convicts plus soldiers to guard them. Convict shipments
went on until 1868, and through the 1840s they comprised most of Australia's European settlers.

With time, four other scattered Australian coastal sites besides Sydney,
near the sites of the modern cities of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Ho-

bart, were chosen as locations of other convict dumps. Those settlements
became the nucleus of five colonies, governed separately by Britain, that
eventually became five of the six states of modern Australia: New South
Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania, respectively.
All five of those initial settlements were at locations chosen for advantages
of their harbors or locations on rivers, rather than for any agricultural ad
vantages. In fact, all proved to be sites poor for agriculture and incapable of
becoming self-supporting in food production. Instead, Britain had to send out food subsidies to the colonies in order to feed the convicts and their
guards and governors. That was not the case, however, for the area around
Adelaide that became the nucleus of the remaining modern Australian state, South Australia. There, good soil resulting from geological uplift, plus fairly
reliable winter rains, attracted German farmers as the sole early group of
emigrants not from Britain. Melbourne also has good soils west of the city
that became the site of a successful agricultural settlement in 1835, after a
convict dump founded in 1803 in poor soils east of the city quickly failed.

The first economic payoff from British settlement of Australia came
from sealing and whaling. The next payoff came from sheep, when a route
across the Blue Mountains 60 miles west of Sydney was finally discovered in
1813, giving access to productive pasture land beyond. However, Australia
did not become self-supporting, and Britain's food subsidies did not cease,
until the 1840s, just before Australia's first gold rush of 1851 at last brought
some prosperity.

When that European settlement of Australia began in 1788, Australia
had of course been settled for over 40,000 years by Aborigines, who had
worked out successful sustainable solutions to the continent's daunting
environmental problems. At the sites of initial European occupation (the convict dumps) and in subsequently settled areas suitable for farming, Australian whites had even less use for Aborigines than white Americans
had for Indians: the Indians in the eastern United States were at least farm
ers and provided crops critical for survival of European settlers during the first years, until Europeans began to grow their own crops. Thereafter, In
dian farmers were merely competition for American farmers and were
killed or driven out. Aboriginal Australians, however, did not farm, hence
could not provide food for settlements, and were killed or driven out of the initial white settled areas. That remained Australian policy as whites ex
panded into areas suitable for farming. However, when whites reached areas
too dry for farming but suitable for pastoralism, they found Aborigines

useful as stockmen to look after sheep: unlike Iceland and New Zealand, two sheep-raising countries that have no native predators on sheep, Aus
tralia had dingos which do prey on sheep, so that Australian sheep farmers
needed shepherds and employed Aborigines because of the shortage of
white labor in Australia. Some Aborigines also worked with whalers, sealers,
fishermen, and coastal traders.

Just as the Norse settlers of Iceland and Greenland brought over the cultural
values of their Norwegian homeland (Chapters 6-8), so too did the British
settlers of Australia carry British cultural values. Just as was the case in Ice
land and Greenland, in Australia as well some of those imported cultural
values proved inappropriate to the Australian environment, and some of
those inappropriate values continue to have legacies today. Five sets of cultural values were particularly important: those involving sheep, rabbits and
foxes, native Australian vegetation, land values, and British identity.

In the 18th century Britain produced little wool itself but instead im
ported it from Spain and Saxony. Those continental sources of wool were
cut off during the Napoleonic Wars, raging during the first decades of
British settlement in Australia. Britain's King George III was particularly in
terested in this problem, and with his support the British succeeded in
smuggling merino sheep from Spain into Britain and then sending some to
Australia to become the founders of Australia's wool flock. Australia evolved
into Britain's main source of wool. Conversely, wool was Australia's main
export from about 1820 to 1950, because its low bulk and high value over
came the tyranny-of-distance problem preventing bulkier potential Aus
tralian exports from competing in overseas markets.

Today, a significant fraction of all food-producing land in Australia is
still used for sheep. Sheep farming is ingrained into Australia's cultural
identity, and rural voters whose livelihood depends on sheep are disproportionately influential in Australian politics. But the appropriateness of Australian land for sheep is deceptive: while it initially supported lush grass, or could be cleared to support lush grass, its soil productivity was (as already
mentioned) very low, so the sheep farmers were in effect mining the land's
fertility. Many sheep properties had to be quickly abandoned; Australia's ex
isting sheep industry is a money-losing proposition (to be discussed below);
and its legacy is ruinous land degradation through overgrazing (Plate 29).

In recent years there have been suggestions that, instead of raising sheep,
Australia should be raising kangaroos, which (unlike sheep) are native Aus-

tralian species that are adapted to Australian plants and climates. It is
claimed that the soft paws of kangaroos are less damaging to soil than are
the hard hooves of sheep. Kangaroo meat is lean, healthy, and (in my opin
ion) absolutely delicious. In addition to their meat, kangaroos yield valuable hides. All of those points are cited as arguments to support replacing
sheep herding with kangaroo ranching.

However, that proposal faces real obstacles, both biological and cultural ones. Unlike sheep, kangaroos are not herd animals that will docilely obey one shepherd and a dog, or that can be rounded up and marched obediently up ramps into trucks for shipment to the slaughterhouse. Instead, would-be
kangaroo ranchers have to hire hunters to chase down and shoot their kan
garoos one by one. Further strikes against kangaroos are their mobility and
fence-jumping prowess: if you invest in promoting growth of a kangaroo population on your property, and if your kangaroos perceive some induce
ment to move (such as rain falling somewhere else), your valuable crop of kangaroos may end up 30 miles away on somebody else's property. While
kangaroo meat is accepted in Germany and some is exported there, sales
of kangaroo meat face cultural obstacles elsewhere. Australians think of kangaroos as vermin holding little appeal for displacing good old British
mutton and beef from the dinner plate. Many Australian animal welfare ad
vocates oppose kangaroo harvesting, overlooking the facts that living con
ditions and slaughter methods are much cruder for domestic sheep and
cattle than for wild kangaroos. The U.S. explicitly forbids the importation
of kangaroo meat because we find the beasts cute, and because a congress
man's wife heard that kangaroos are endangered. Some kangaroo species
are indeed endangered, but ironically the species actually harvested for
meat are abundant pest animals in Australia. The Australian government
strictly regulates their harvest and sets a quota.

Whereas introduced sheep have undoubtedly been of great economic
benefit (as well as harm) to Australia, introduced rabbits and foxes have
been unmitigated disasters. British colonists found Australia's environment,
plants, and animals alien and wanted to be surrounded by familiar European plants and animals. Hence they attempted to introduce many European bird species, only two of which, the House Sparrow and Starling,
became widespread, while others (the Blackbird, Song Thrush, Tree Spar
row, Goldfinch, and Greenfinch) became established only locally. At least,
those introduced bird species have not done much harm, while Australia's
rabbits in plague numbers cause enormous economic damage and land
degradation by consuming about half of the pasture vegetation that would

otherwise have been available to sheep and cattle (Plate 30). Along with
habitat changes through sheep grazing and suppression of Aboriginal land
burning, the combination of introduced rabbits and introduced foxes has been a major cause of the extinctions or population crashes of most spe
cies of small native Australian mammals: foxes prey on them, and rabbits
compete with native herbivorous mammals for food.

European rabbits and foxes were introduced to Australia almost simul
taneously. It is unclear whether foxes were introduced first to permit tra
ditional British fox hunting, then rabbits introduced later to provide
additional food for the foxes, or whether rabbits were introduced first for hunting or to make the countryside look more like Britain and then foxes
introduced later to control the rabbits. In any case, both have been such expensive disasters that it now seems incredible that they were introduced for
such trivial reasons. Even more incredible are the efforts to which Aus
tralians went to establish rabbits: the first four attempts failed (because the
rabbits released were tame white rabbits that died), and not until wild Span
ish rabbits were used for the fifth attempt did success follow.

Ever since those rabbits and foxes did become established and Australians realized the consequences, they have been trying to eliminate or
reduce their populations. The war against foxes involves poisoning or trap
ping them. One method in the war against rabbits, memorable to all non-
Australians who saw the recent film
Rabbit Proof Fence,
is to divide up the
landscape by long fences and attempt to eliminate rabbits from one side of
the fence. Farmer Bill Mcintosh told me how he makes a map of his prop
erty to mark the locations of every one of its thousands of rabbit burrows,
which he destroys individually with a bulldozer. He then returns to a bur
row later, and if it shows any fresh sign of rabbit activity, he drops dynamite
down the burrow to kill the rabbits and then seals up the burrow. In this laborious way he has destroyed 3,000 rabbit burrows. Such expensive mea
sures led Australians several decades ago to place great hopes in introducing
a rabbit disease called myxomatosis, which initially did reduce the population by over 90% until rabbits became resistant and rebounded. Current ef
forts to control rabbits are using another microbe called the calicivirus.

Just as British colonists preferred their familiar rabbits and blackbirds and felt uncomfortable amidst Australia's strange-looking kangaroos and friarbirds, they also felt uncomfortable among Australia's eucalyptus and
acacia trees, so different in appearance, color, and leaves from British wood
land trees. Settlers cleared the land of vegetation partly because they didn't
like its appearance, but also for agriculture. Until about 20 years ago, the