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By Root 2084 0

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 minerals may thus be contrasted with exploiting renewable resources—such as forests, fish, and topsoil—that do regenerate themselves by biological reproduction or by soil formation. Renewable resources can be exploited indefinitely, 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 exceeding their renewal rates, they too will eventually be depleted to extinction, 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 renewable but the latter aren’t.

While many other countries today besides Australia are mining their environments, 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 perhaps 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 continue. 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, desperately 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 throughout 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 today. 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 potential overseas enemies has also shaped Australian environmental and population policies. Australia also displays the importance of cultural values, including some imported ones that could be viewed as inappropriate to the Australian landscape, for understanding environmental