A reply by Allen Myers
The article to which Jenny Goldie refers was not an editorial, but a Viewpoint by Marina Carman, a member of the Environmental Youth Alliance. However, Jenny Goldie's arguments obviously concern more than that one article, and I would like to comment on a few of her points from what I consider to be a green and left standpoint.
1. I hope that in the future both sides in this and any other debate will avoid distorted arguments of the type of Goldie's suggestion that Green Left Weekly "would prefer that Third World women remain barefoot and pregnant all their lives". She is surely aware that left greens argue consistently that improving the economic and social status of women (in all countries) is a priority.
Goldie's distortion here is comparable to an opponent of AESP asserting that AESP must be in favour of wars, since wars reduce population. We really can't afford the luxury of cheap point scoring; let's discuss the issues honestly.
2. Goldie's claim that Australia had and has too large an immigration program is not well supported. The fact that immigration rates are high on a per capita basis merely reflects Australia's low population. If Australia had a population of 1.7 million instead of 17 million, a given number of migrants would represent ten times the per capita rate, but it would hardly mean that Australia had less room for migrants.
3. AESP mistakenly regards population as the chief cause of the environmental crisis. Some letters from AESP to this paper have suggested that in fact AESP has a broader concept in which population is only one element. Be that as it may, AESP chose its own name. It could have been Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Society, or Australians for Ecological Sustainability; it chose Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population.
Jenny Goldie's comment well illustrates how limiting this mistaken notion is. For example, world food production is predicted to fall by 20% in the next 25 years. This will happen, if we allow it to, through soil erosion and depletion caused by destructive farming methods such as use of pesticides and herbicides, logging of water catchment areas and similar factors. Hence, if we reduce world population by 20% in the next quarter century, but leave the existing social and economic relations intact, we will still confront looming food shortages as soil destruction continued.
What has to be changed as a matter of urgency is not the number of people but the conditions which make it necessary or attractive for people to destroy the possibility of future food production.
Another example: fossil fuels will be exhausted by the year 2100. Halve the world's population today, leaving other things unchanged, and the fuels will last to 2200. There is no real future for the human race — whatever its numbers — without a change to a rational, conserving form of economic organisation.
4. AESP's focus on people as the problem is a conservative position that lets the existing social relations off the hook. This is the reason for Jenny Goldie's upset at the leftism of Green Left Weekly.
Instead of attempting to define "green" to exclude anyone who disagrees with her position, Jenny Goldie would do better to acknowledge that there are left greens and centre greens as well as the right greens that AESP speaks for. We could then get on to discussing these different approaches, what they might be able to learn from each other and how, hopefully, we might work together to save the planet and our common future.