Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

jennifer

A Herd of Independent Minds

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Owen Harries writes in today’s Financial Review,

“On political matters, intellectuals tend to share two characteristics: they are slaves to fashion; and on the big questions, they tend to get things hopelessly wrong.”

Harries proceeds to give a few thousand words of relevant examples beginning with,

“If you had been a man of affairs living in 1910 or thereabouts, it is likely that you woiuld have been well aware of the increasing tense international atmosphere, as Germany not content with having the most powerful army in the world, sought to challenge Britian as a leading naval power. But if you had been an intellectual living in the same period, chances are you would have subscribed to the view, propagated by Norman Angell in The Great Illusion, that war was a dying institution… ”

The Club of Rome predictions in the 1970s – that unless we limit population and industrial growth the world would self-destruct by the end of century – are included in Harries list.

Harries asks, “Why do intellectuals get things so wrong, so often? The question is worth asking because they are still with us, still vocal, still taken seriously by many as the interpreters of the course of human history. A large part of the answer, surely, lies in the intellectuals’ search for – demand for – coherence in human affairs, for pattern, for meaning and consistency. Once this was found in the form of religion; for the past hundred years or more, most intellectuals have found it in the form of ideology.”

Does this provide some insight into how and why some of our most revered environmentalist academics get it so wrong – from Paul Ehrlich to Ian Lowe?

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The piece by Owen Harries titled ‘The parochialism of the present’ is to appear “simultaneously in the inaugural issue of The American Interest” at www.the-american-interest.com. But I can’t find it there.

Will Queensland Mine Uranium?

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I missed the following in The Australian this morning,

CANADIAN miner Maple Minerals is to take control of one of Queensland’s richest uranium deposits in a gamble that the Beattie Government will bow to pressure to reverse Labor’s ban on new mines.

Maple acquired Ben Lomond mine, near Charters Towers, from French multinational Cogema earlier this year for a bargain $1 million, before Canberra’s decision last month to take over the Northern Territory’s administration of uranium mining.

The company is waiting for Queensland Natural Resources and Mining Minister Henry Palaszczuk to give final approval for the deal and is expecting an answer in coming weeks.

Koalas Will Chew Gum in Tokyo

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I have really enjoyed reading ‘Going Native: Living in the Australian environment’ by Michael Archer and Bob Beale (Hodder, 2004). The book promotes the commercial potential of Australian native plants and animals – from kangaroos and koalas to tea-tree oil.

Archer and Beale make an interesting observation on page 142:

“If the natural world is to have a future, we need to understand that the love of animals based on use and dependence has always led to a commitment to conserve.

Indigenous peoples who remain hunter-gatherers have a love and respect for animals, plants and ecoystems that most of us simply do not understand because they, unlike us, are still an indivisible part of the environments upon which they depend.

… Once we build the fence and climbed over it, we lost the plot and threatened the future. The mindset of animal rights advocates who argue against the value of using animals would seem incomprehensible to hunter-gatherers – as it would to the animals themselves if they were somehow able to conceptualize it. To argue, for example, as some animal rights advocates do, that a koala would rather be starving in an eaten-out forest remnant than sold to become an exhibit in a Japanese zoo strikes us not only as absurd but extraordinarily presumptuous. It seems certain to us that the koala would be as willing to chew gum leaves in Tokyo as in Taronga Zoo or Tower Hill.”

I reckon the koala would probably be happier in Tower Hill (western Victoria). But hey, if it was a question of life or death – well even I might move to Tokyo.

There is an organisation with website based on the principles promoted in the book, see http://www.fate.unsw.edu.au/ .

Grape Glut

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The front page of today’s Australian Financial Review (AFR) included the headline ‘Grape glut crushes winemakers profits’.

A record harvest of 1.92 million tonnes!

It seems amazing given the recent drought.

When I started working on Murray River issues in mid-2003, Prof Peter Cullen and other environmental scientists were telling farmers they should move from growing rice to growing grapes because water should go to higher-value crops.

I think there is something in the argument that the annual crop rice suits a land of ‘drought and flooding rains’ better than the perennial crop grapes because grapes need water every year.

According to the AFR “tax-driven vineyard schemes have helped double Australia’s vineyard areas in the past seven years, distorting the economics of the industry and leading to overproduction across the country.”

According to ABC Television’s landline program in April, some grape growers weren’t going to bother picking their fruit at all.

Chicken Little, Prof Lowe Pre-empts the Movie

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I was going to proceed chapter by chapter through Ian Lowe’s new book ‘A Big Fix: Radical solutions for Australia’s environmental crisis’ but by the time I get to chapter 6 I’ll have missed the key points, or lost my audience, or both. So here goes the dive bomb.

Lowe begins the book by stating that he is a scientist.

Then on page 86, he says,

“Sustainability science [which he supports in previous paragraph] differs fundamentally from most science as we know it. The traditional scientific method is based on sequential phases of inquiry: conceptualizing the problem, collecting data, developing theories, then applying the results. …Sustainability science will have to employ new methods, such as semi-quantitative modeling of qualitative data, or inverse approaches that work backwards from undesirable consequences to identify better ways to progress. Researchers will have to work with land-users to produce new understandings that combine scientific excellence with social relevance.”

So Lowe is suggesting that:
1. Science should not be sequential,
2. There is such a thing as semi-quantitative modeling,
3. We should image the worst, no matter how unlikely.

But science has to be sequential. You advance a hypothesis. For a hypothesis to be proven, it needs to be predictive, so you make predictions based on the hypothesis and devise ways of testing the prediction. There is no way that any of those steps can be taken out of sequence and still be called science. An adjective like ‘sustainability’ can only qualify the noun, it can’t negate it.

The wooliness of Lowe’s thinking is demonstrated by his second proposition. The only thing that “semi-quantitative modeling of qualitative data” can indicate is that he doesn’t want to count the results accurately. Quantitative is a digital concept, it doesn’t come in shades.

The third proposition could be referred to as the “Chicken Little Principle”. “If I say the sky is falling, then there is no time to go through the normal rigour of the scientific method, because by that time the sky will have fallen. So let’s ‘desequentialise’ and ignore the facts, it will make me feel better, and guess what, the sky won’t fall either!” Yes, and the same logic applied to milk souring in the middle ages led to lots of little old ladies being drowned in duck ponds.

I protested when Joh Bjelke-Petersen was awarded an honourary doctorate of laws because of his contempt for the law. In the circumstances I would be inconsistent if I didn’t call on Griffith University to strip Lowe of his professorship in a science faculty. He has abandoned science.

I know a lot of people have a lot of time for Ian Lowe, but on the evidence of this book his time has passed.