Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [255]
Thus, Australia has an exceptionally fragile environment, damaged in a multitude of ways incurring enormous economic costs. Some of those costs stem from past damage that is now irreversible, such as some forms of land degradation and the extinctions of native species (relatively more species in recent times in Australia than on any other continent). Most of the types of damage are still ongoing today, or even increasing or accelerating as in the case of old-growth forest logging in Tasmania. Some of the damaging processes are virtually impossible to halt now because of long built-in time delays, such as the effects of slow underground downhill flows of already-mobilized saline groundwater that will continue to spread for centuries. Many Australian cultural attitudes, as well as government policies, remain the ones that caused damage in the past and are still continuing to cause it. For instance, among the political obstacles to a reform of water policies are obstacles arising from a market for “water licenses” (rights to extract water for irrigation). The purchasers of those licenses understandably feel that they actually own the water that they have paid dearly to extract, even though full exercise of the licenses is impossible because the total amount of water for which licenses have been issued may exceed the amount of water available in a normal year.
To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober thinking, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment. That is an entirely realistic scenario for Australia’s future—much more likely than either a plunge into an Easter Island-like population crash and political collapse as prophesized by doomsday advocates, or a continuation of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely assumed by many of Australia’s current politicians and business leaders. The implausibility of the latter two scenarios, and the realistic prospects of the first scenario, apply to the rest of the First World as well, with the sole difference that Australia could end up in the first scenario sooner.
Fortunately, there are signs of hope. They involve changing attitudes, rethinking by Australia’s farmers, private initiatives, and the beginnings of radical governmental initiatives. All that rethinking illustrates a theme that we already encountered in connection with the Greenland Norse (Chapter 8), and to which we shall return in Chapters 14 and 16: the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core values are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.
When I first visited Australia 40 years ago, many Australian landowners responded to criticism that they were damaging their land for future generations or producing damage for other people by responding, “It’s my land, and I can bloody well do with it whatever I bloody please.” While one still hears such attitudes today, they are becoming less frequent and less publicly acceptable. Whereas the government until a few decades ago faced little resistance to its enforcing environmentally destructive regulations (e.g., requiring land clearance) and putting through environmentally destructive schemes (e.g., the Murray River dams and the Ord River Scheme), the Australian public today, like the public in Europe, North America, and other areas, is increasingly vocal on environmental matters. Public opposition has been especially loud to land clearance, river development, and old-growth logging. At the moment that I write these lines, those public attitudes have just resulted in the South Australian state government