Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (75 page)

sumption or crop irrigation without the added expense of desalination.
Even more expensive than either of those two problems are the damages caused by salt corroding infrastructure, including roads, railroads, airfields,
bridges, buildings, water pipes, hot water systems, rainwater systems, sew
ers, household and industrial appliances, power and telecommunication
lines, and water treatment plants. Overall, it is estimated that only about a
third of Australia's economic losses arising from salinization are the direct
costs to Australian agriculture; the losses "beyond the farm gate" and downstream, to Australia's water supplies and infrastructure, cost twice as much.

As for the extent of salinization, it already affects about 9% of all cleared
land in Australia, and that percentage is projected under present trends to
rise to about 25%. Salinization is currently especially serious in the states of
Western Australia and South Australia; the former state's wheat belt is con
sidered one of the worst examples of dryland salinization in the world. Of
its original native vegetation, 90% has now been cleared, mostly between 1920 and 1980, culminating in the "Million Acres a Year" program pushed by the Western Australia state government in the 1960s. No other equally
large area of land in the world was cleared of its natural vegetation so
quickly. The proportion of the wheat belt sterilized by salinization is ex
pected to reach one-third within the next two decades.

The total area in Australia to which salinization has the potential for spreading is more than 6 times the current extent and includes a 4-fold in
crease in Western Australia, 7-fold increase in Queensland, 10-fold increase
in Victoria, and 60-fold increase in New South Wales. In addition to the wheat belt, another major problem area is the basin of the Murray/Darling
River, which accounts for nearly half of Australia's agricultural production
but which now gets progressively saltier downstream towards Adelaide be
cause of more salty underground water entering and more water being ex
tracted for irrigation by humans along its length. (In some years so much
water is extracted that no water is left in the river to enter the ocean.) That
salt input into the Murray/Darling arises not just from irrigation practices
along the river's lower reaches but also from the impact of increasingly extensive industrial-scale cotton farming along its headwaters in Queensland and New South Wales. Those cotton operations are considered Australia's biggest single dilemma of land and water management, because on the one
hand cotton by itself is Australia's most valuable crop after wheat, but on
the other hand the mobilized salt and applied pesticides associated with
cotton-growing damage other types of agriculture downstream in the
Murray/Darling Basin.

Once salinization has been initiated, it is often either poorly reversible
(especially in the case of dryland salinization), or prohibitively expensive to
solve, or solutions take a prohibitively long time. Underground rivers flow
very slowly, such that once one has mobilized salt through bad land man
agement, it may take 500 years to flush that mobilized salt out of the ground
even if one switches overnight to drip irrigation and stops mobilizing fur
ther salt.

While land degradation resulting from all those causes is Australia's most expensive environmental problem, five other sets of serious problems de
serve briefer mention: those involving forestry, marine fisheries, freshwater
fisheries, freshwater itself, and alien species.

Apart from Antarctica, Australia is the continent with proportionately the least area covered by forests: only about 20% of the continent's total
area. They used to include possibly the world's tallest trees, now-felled Victorian Blue Gums, rivaling or topping California Coast Redwoods in height.
Of Australia's forests standing at the time of European settlement in 1788,
40% have already been cleared, 35% have been partly logged, and only 25%
remain intact. Nevertheless, logging of that small area of remaining old-growth forests is continuing and constitutes yet another instance of mining
the Australian landscape.

The export uses (in addition to domestic consumption) to which timber
logged from Australia's remnant forests is being put are remarkable. Of for
est product exports, half are not in the form of logs or finished materials but are turned into wood chips and sent mostly to Japan, where they are used to produce paper and its products and make up one-quarter of the
material in Japanese paper. While the price that Japan pays to Australia for
those wood chips has dropped to $7 per ton, the resulting paper sells in
Japan for $1,000 per ton, so that almost all of the value added to the timber
after it is cut accrues to Japan rather than to Australia. At the same time as it
exports wood chips, Australia imports nearly three times more forest prod
ucts than it exports, with more than half of those imports being in the form
of paper and paperboard products.

Thus, the Australian forest products trade involves a double irony. On the one hand, Australia, one of the First World countries with the least for
est, is still logging those shrinking forests to export their products to Japan, the First World country with the highest percentage of its land under forest
(74%) and with that percentage still growing. Second, Australia's forest

products trade in effect consists of exporting raw material at a low price, to
be converted in another country into finished material at a high price and
with high added value, and then importing finished materials. One expects
to encounter that particular type of asymmetry not in the trade relations
between two First World countries, but instead when an economically back
ward, non-industrialized Third World colony unsophisticated at negotiations deals with a First World country sophisticated at exploiting Third
World countries, buying their raw materials cheaply, adding value to the
materials at home, and exporting expensive manufactured goods to the
colony. (Japan's major exports to Australia include cars, telecommunica
tions equipment, and computing equipment, while coal and minerals are
Australia's other major exports to Japan.) That is, it would appear that Australia is squandering a valuable resource and receiving little money for it.

The continued logging of old-growth forests is giving rise to one of the most passionate environmental debates in Australia today. Most of the log
ging and the fiercest debate are going on in the state of Tasmania, where
Tasmania Blue Gums, at up to 305 feet tall some of the world's tallest remaining trees outside of California, are now being logged faster than ever. Both of Australia's major political parties, at both the state and federal levels, favor continued logging of Tasmanian old-growth forests. A possible
reason is suggested by the fact that, after the National Party announced its
strong support for Tasmanian logging in 1995, it became known that the
party's three biggest financial contributors were logging companies.

In addition to mining its old-growth forests, Australia has also planted agroforestry plantations, both of native and of non-native tree species. For
all the reasons mentioned previously
—low soil nutrient levels, low and un
predictable rainfall, and resulting low growth rates of trees—agroforestry is much less profitable and faces higher costs in Australia than in 12 out of the 13 countries that are among its principal competitors. Even Australia's most
valuable commercially surviving timber tree species, that Tasmanian Blue Gum, grows faster and more profitably in overseas plantations where it has been planted (in Brazil, Chile, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Vietnam)
than in Tasmania itself.

The mining of Australia's marine fisheries resembles that of its forests.
Basically, Australia's tall trees and lush grass deceived the first European set
tlers into overrating Australia's potential for food production on land: in technical terms used by ecologists, the land supported large standing
crops but low productivity. The same is true of Australia's oceans, whose
productivity is low because it depends on nutrient runoff from that same

unproductive land, and because Australian coastal waters lack nutrient-rich upwellings comparable to the Humboldt current off the west coast of South
America. Australia's marine populations tend to have low growth rates, so
that they are easily overfished. For example, within the last two decades
there has been a worldwide boom in a fish called Orange Roughy, caught in Australian and New Zealand waters and providing the basis of a fishery that
has been profitable in the short term. Unfortunately, closer studies showed that Orange Roughy are very slow-growing, they do not start to breed until
they are about 40 years old, and the fish caught and eaten are often 100
years old. Hence Orange Roughy populations cannot possibly breed fast enough to replace the adults being removed by fishermen, and that fishery
is now in decline.

Australia has exhibited a history of marine overfishing: mining one
stock until it is depleted to uneconomically low levels, then discovering a
new fishery and switching to it until it too collapses within a short time, like
a gold rush. After a new fishery opens, a scientific study by marine biologists
may be initiated to determine the maximal sustainable harvesting rates, but
the fishery is at risk of collapsing before recommendations from the study
become available. Australian victims of such overfishing, besides Orange
Roughy, include Coral Trout, Eastern Gemfish, Exmouth Gulf Tiger Prawns,
School Sharks, Southern Bluefin Tuna, and Tiger Flathead. The only Australian marine fishery for which there are well-supported claims of sustain
able harvesting involves the Western Australian rock lobster population,
which is currently Australia's most valuable seafood export and whose
healthy status has been evaluated independently by the Marine Stewardship
Council (to be discussed in Chapter 15).

Like its marine fisheries, Australia's freshwater fisheries as well are lim
ited by low productivity because of low nutrient runoff from the unproduc
tive land. Also like the marine fisheries, the freshwater fisheries have
deceptively large standing crops but low production. For example, Aus
tralia's largest freshwater fish species is the Murray Cod, up to three feet
long and confined to the Murray/Darling river system. It is good eating,
highly valued, and formerly so abundant that it used to be caught and
shipped to markets by the truckload. Now, the Murray Cod fishery has been closed because of the decline and collapse of the catch. Among the causes of that collapse are the overharvesting of a slow-growing fish species, as in the
case of Orange Roughy; effects of introduced carp, which increase water
turbidity; and several consequences of dams built on the Murray River in
the 1930s, which interrupted fish spawning movements, decreased river wa-

ter temperature (because dam managers released cold bottom water too
cold for the fish's reproduction, rather than warmer surface water), and converted a river formerly receiving periodic nutrient inputs from floods into permanent bodies of water with little nutrient renewal.

Today, the financial yield from Australia's freshwater fisheries is trivial. For instance, all freshwater fisheries in the state of South Australia generate
only $450,000 per year, divided among 30 people who fish only as a part-
time occupation. A properly managed sustainable fishery for Murray Cod and Golden Perch, the Murray/Darling's other economically valuable fish species, could surely yield far more money than that, but it is unknown
whether damage to Murray/Darling fisheries is now irreversible.

As for freshwater itself, Australia is the continent with the least of it.
Most of that little freshwater that is readily accessible to populated areas is already utilized for drinking or agriculture. Even the country's largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two-thirds of its total water flow drawn off by humans in an average year, and in some years virtually all of its water. Australia's freshwater sources that remain unutilized consist mainly of rivers in
remote northern areas, far from human settlements or agricultural lands
where they could be put to use. As Australia's population grows, and as its
unutilized supplies of freshwater dwindle, some settled areas may be forced
to turn to more expensive desalinization for their freshwater. There is al
ready a desalinization plant on Kangaroo Island, and one may be needed
soon on the Eyre Peninsula.

Several major projects in the past to modify unutilized Australian rivers
have turned out to be costly failures. For instance, in the 1930s it was pro
posed to build several dozen dams along the Murray River in order to permit freight traffic by ship, and about half of those planned dams were built
by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before the plan was abandoned. There
is now no commercial freight traffic on the Murray River, but the dams did
contribute to the already-mentioned collapse of the Murray Cod fishery.
One of the most expensive failures was the Ord River Scheme, which in
volved damming a river in a remote and sparsely populated area of north
western Australia in order to irrigate land for growing barley, corn, cotton,
safflower, soybeans, and wheat. Eventually, only cotton among all those
crops was grown on a small scale and failed after 10 years. Sugar and melons
are now being produced there, but the value of their yield does not come
close to matching the project's great expense.

In addition to those problems of water quantity, accessibility, and use, there are also issues of water quality. Utilized rivers contain toxins,