Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Philosophy

Should Academics Play E-Politics?

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What role might Universities play in the “small-p politics” of the environment? This is the subject of a piece in today’s The Australian in which I am quoted as saying, academics should foster informed debate but not be “advocates of a particular perspective”.

Professor Peter Fairweather from Flinder’s University is quoted, “We (academics) have to primarily give the scientific view first because nobody else can really do that.”

I note the word “scientific view”. I would like to think it was a poor choice of words.

It seems to me that academics increasingly confuse evidence, facts, theories and hypothesis, from arguments, from knowledge. Then there is opinion and there are views. And then there is the truth.

The Professor goes on to suggest that, when scientists spoke in the policy debate they should make this clear since as citizens they did not “necessarily have any more importance than anyone else, because everyone’s got a view of what we should do policy-wise,” he said.

What waffle! There are views and views and views. But it requires discipline and knowledge to build a robust argument.

The piece in The Australian is reporting on a decision by the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee to consider a role for universities in environmental politics.

I do think it is good the issue is being considered. But let us not pretend that Universities are not already involved in environmental politics. I know a professor in a Life Science Faculty that has unashamably very publicly driven campaigns for WWF.

Truth & Beauty

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Comment from Walter Stark PhD,

There is a most interesting essay by Rebeca Goldstein on Godel and the ‘Nature of Mathematical Truth’ at The Edge website.

It deals with the fundamental philosophical divide between those on the one side who accept that an objective reality does exist, that truth is defined by its consistency with objective reality and that beauty arises from the recognition of such truth, and those on the other who believe that reality,truth and beauty are ultimately our own constructions.

While the former pursue the discovery of truth, the latter aim to construct it in accord with whatever hopes, ideologies or ethics they deem desirable.

This same division seems to underlie much of my own dissention from various mainstream environmental concerns. What to the constructionists is a righteous crusade for the betterment of humankind appears to the realist an ugly disregard for truth and reality.

As for reality itself the SF writer Philip K. Dick said it well, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Goldstein’s essay is at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge162.html.

Eating Whales (Part 2)

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Whalers in Norway, Iceland and Greenland have called Australia’s attempts to ban commercial whaling “ridiculous”, according to a report on ABC Online.

Federal Environment Minister Senator Ian Campbell is lobbying in Europe and the Pacific to get an international ban on whaling. But the whalers are suggesting that Australia’s environmental record and opposition to the Kyoto protocol leave it in no position to argue.

Anthropologist Ron Brunton wrote an insightful piece on the subject for the Courier Mail in 2001. Extract follows:

They (governments of Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and the United States) become indignant when they are accused of cultural imperialism by people who wish to continue eating whale meat, like the Japanese. As these governments and the anti-whaling activists who support them see it, they are fighting for a universal ethical principle, not a recently developed cultural preference. And they are angry about Japan’s success in thwarting a proposal for a South Pacific whale sanctuary at the recently concluded meeting of the International Whaling Commission by using aid to bribe Caribbean members of the IWC.

There is a considerable amount of effrontery in their response to Japan. The IWC was established in 1946 by fourteen whaling nations to assist the orderly development of the industry by encouraging the proper conservation of whale stocks. But as whale devotion gathered momentum in the 1970s, the United States and environmentalist NGOs induced a number of non-whaling nations to join the IWC, intending to create a majority in favour of ending the whaling industry, in contravention of the IWC’s own charter.

In 1982 this expanded IWC instituted a moratorium on all commercial whaling, to take effect from 1986. Japan and its pro-whaling allies such as Norway have merely used tactics that are little different from those that the anti-whalers earlier used against them.

Despite various attempts by animal rights and conservation organisations to obfuscate the issue, only a few whale species, such as the blue and the humpback, can be portrayed as endangered. Most of the other commercially valued species are abundant, and would face no threat of extinction under a properly controlled resumption of the whaling industry.

A good illustration of the kind of humbug that often characterises the anti-whaling forces came from New Zealand’s leftist Minister of Conservation, Sandra Lee, at last year’s IWC meeting. Vowing that she would never stop seeking to protect whales, Ms Lee told delegates that in Maori legend the great whales were portrayed as guides and guardians of humans on the oceans, ‘treasure, to be preserved … the chiefly peoples of the ocean world’.

This is true. But Ms Lee, who is a Maori herself, seems to have omitted a crucial fact from her impassioned speech. Their legends did not prevent the Maori from being avid consumers of the meat, oil and other products of cetaceans. Beached whales were butchered and became the property of the local chief, who would share the carcass with his group. Smaller cetaceans were actively hunted with harpoons and nets.
Furthermore, the official Maori position, as expressed by Te Ohu Kai Moana, the Treaty of Waitangi Fisheries Commission, is opposed to the New Zealand government’s backing of the South Pacific whale sanctuary. Te Ohu Kai Moana supports the right of ‘indigenous and coastal peoples’ around the world to engage in sustainable commercial whaling, and condemns the New Zealand government for not consulting properly with Maori about the whale sanctuary proposal.

Eating Whales

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I lived in Africa from 1985 to 1992 and I worked for a period in Kenya with a fellow who grew up along the shores of Lake Victoria.

The first time David saw the ocean was when we traveled together from Nairobi to Mombassa and then on to Malindi doing field survey work.

To commemorate David’s first trip to the coast I suggested we have lunch at a resort just north of Mombassa.

We walked into the buffet lunch, come seafood smorgasbord, and David was incredulous.

“You don’t eat those things,” he said laughing and pointing at the huge bowl of prawns.

They live in the mud and feed-on the crap at the bottom of the lake he went on to explain. He was referring to yabbies.

Diet is cultural. I lived in Madagascar for some years and there was a proverb that went something along the lines, “If you haven’t eaten rice with your meal, you haven’t eaten.”

So should the Japanese be allowed to eat whales?

In today’s The Australian, Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell is reported saying:

The world’s humpback whale population had been reduced by 97per cent by commercial whaling. In the 20 years since commercial whaling had been banned, numbers had still only increased to 25 per cent of the original population. “Now is not the time to start hunting them again”.

So he is running the argument that the Japanese should not be hunting whales because numbers are low. But then the piece in the newspaper went on,

Senator Campbell said he hoped to end the whale kills that Japan conducts in the name of science and was shocked and saddened by recently broadcast images of whale-cooking classes in Japan.

“Anyone who sees a giant and highly-intelligent creature getting harpooned – having a grenade set off inside its head or inside its stomach and if it doesn’t get killed within 20 or 30 minutes they stick an electronic lance in it – if somebody doesn’t get emotional about that there’s something wrong with them.”

In a land-based context there is an argument that sustainable harvesting programs focused on native species can enhance conservation. Bob Beale and Mike Archer writing in the Australian Financial Review (23-28th December 2004) argued that mallee fowl and giant bustard would not be “facing oblivion if we served them up for Christmas dinner instead of Asian chicken and North American turkey”.

Should every thinking environmentalist be vegetarian?

Jaded Kids & Jared Diamond

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A recent report by the Australian Institute titled “The Attitudes of Young People to the Environment” concluded that:

“Despite the increase in both scientific and political attention paid to environmental problems and a heightened emphasis on the environment in school curricula, young Australians are among the least likely to see themselves as environmentalists … They are, however, among the most likely to believe that threats to the environment are exaggerated.”

The report is based on data collected by Roy Morgan research from 56,344 respondents aged 14 and over across Australia.

Institute Director Dr Clive Hamiton has interpreted the results as a problem with our political leadership and suggested that “Howard’s children are characterised by apathy and scepticism.”

I disagree completely. I would suggest they are just a bit tired of the exaggeration and looking for something more substantive and interesting than what the mainstream media and their mostly too politically correct teachers tell them about the environment.

No doubt they will be even more jaded after the visit by Californian Professor Jared Diamond to Australia. He is speaking at the Sydney Writers festival on 29th May and in Brisbane on Thursday 2 June.

Diamond will be promoting his new book titled “Collapse”.

Rethinking Environmentalism

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Following is an extract from my speech to the Timber Communities Australia Conference in Launceston, Tasmania:

“It is a fact of life that if you don’t have your own clear plan, your own vision, you will likely be recruited into implementing someone else’s plan.

Organizations such as WWF and Greenpeace don’t undertake much tree-planting or grow any organic food themselves. These organizations exist to recruit others to implement their plans, their vision of what is best for the environment.

The Federal Coalition Government has been bankrolling these organisations to promote their vision. For example the federal government provided grants to WWF of over $15 million during the period 1996-2003.

We need a new vision. We need a new environment organisation within which we can start discussing and debating the principles I have outlined.

And there is a new environment group just starting up, and working from a radically different value-set than the established groups. The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) has just formed and embraced the following 6 values based on my five principles:

1. Evidence – policies are set and decisions are made on the basis of facts, evidence and scientific analysis;

2. Choice – issues are prioritised on the basis of accurate risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis;

3. Technology – appropriate and innovative technological solutions are implemented.

4. Management – active management is used when necessary, acknowledging that landscapes and ecosystems are dynamic;

5. Diversity – biological diversity is maintained;

6. People – the needs and aspirations of people are balanced against environmental issues.

Working logically from these basic values and from my principles, could result in some radical outcomes. For example, if we value evidence, and if we are concerned about reducing our ecological footprint, then it logically follows that it is actually better to buy GM than organic. It might actually be better to support the Australian timber industry than to import timber from Malaysia and Indonesia.”

For more information on AEF and its soon to be launched website watch this web-blog.