By Lisa Macdonald
The debate about the impact of population, and therefore immigration, on Australia's environment is a crucial one for all progressive people. The position that we take defines on which side of the human rights divide we stand, and also where we stand in relation to the struggle for human and ecological survival.
In his reply to my article "Environment: Why cutting immigration won't help" (GLW, November 27), Col Friel calls for a rational (rather than hysterical) debate (GLW, January 22). I agree. So let's get the main furphy out of the road.
Neither I nor any rational socialist argues for "perpetual population growth", as Friel charges. As stated in my original article, "any given ecological space can be overfilled by an indefinite increase in population". The consequences for those populations and their environment can be disastrous. So we agree: There is an urgent need to prevent perpetual population growth and to halt and repair the destruction of our environment.
The real debate is about how to proceed in these tasks. That means correctly identifying the fundamental causes of both population growth and environmental destruction. This cannot be done outside the social context in which these problems exist.
The most urgent and important task for left greens in Australia in this regard is to challenge an argument used by Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population, Australians Against Further Immigration, the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australian Democrats and many leaders of the Labor Party, among others. This is the claim that immigrants specifically, and the majority of Australians more generally, are the cause of the environmental crisis because their consumption causes environmental destruction.
It is no coincidence that this argument is being advocated with more confidence today when Pauline Hanson, the Coalition and the bosses' media are attacking people of colour and immigrants. Far from being a "straw man", as Friel asserts, racism is inherent in blaming immigration (and therefore migrants) for environmental destruction in a context where the overwhelming majority of people wanting to migrate to Australia are people of colour.
To deny those people the basic human right to live wherever they want, and in particular to deny them entry to "our country" and a better standard of living, is racist, regardless of the intent.
Friel asserts that people's consumption is the principle cause of environmental destruction. On these grounds he argues for de-population and therefore lower immigration levels in Australia.
The logic of his argument is that production and the ecological damage it causes (waste accumulation, pollution, soil and water depletion, etc) are driven by consumption. Yet Friel also concedes that the opposite is true, that "it is the profit motive that is the driving force of all production", not the population's needs or wants.
People's consumption patterns are determined by what, how and in what form commodities are produced. The majority of people neither need nor want dozens of types of toothpaste or clothes detergent to choose from, for example. Nor do they need or particularly want to spend their hard-earned money on petrol to run cars when solar powered cars or good public transport are viable alternatives.
If the methods and output of production genuinely reflected the needs and desires of the majority of people rather than those of a tiny minority whose only interest is profits, the sun, wind and tides could be harnessed to meet most if not all of our energy requirements; industrial pollution could be massively reduced; and we can only guess at the potential for reducing the human waste steam, recycling almost every product and returning to the ecosystem much of what is extracted from it.
Friel laments population growth and advocates less immigration on the grounds that every increase in human habitat decreases that of other life forms. This is a general truth applicable to all species.
The essential point is that humans' impact on other life forms is principally a consequence of the destructive way in which human habitation is currently designed and developed under capitalism. Even if the area inhabited by humans was to decrease over time, unless the remaining population's distribution of wealth, use of natural resources and production and waste disposal methods changed dramatically, the detrimental effects on other species would continue to be immense.
The central issue, however, is one of politics, not "natural" limits. In the end, those who address the environment crisis principally in terms of the "number of people" rather than the social structures within which those people live, must come to terms with the fact that any measure to reduce human population involves conscious decisions about who should live where, in what numbers and under what conditions.
These decisions are already being made — not freely and democratically by the majority of people, but by a tiny wealthy elite. This ruling class and their representatives in government make all the important decisions about what is produced, in what countries, for what purposes and for whom.
In so doing, they have already decided that rapid population growth, almost always a product of poverty and lack of choice for the majority of the world's women, will continue. They have decided that millions of people in the Third World will not even survive and, while most of those who do will live in misery, they will not be allowed to escape their suffering by migrating to the country of their choice.
Capitalism has had to create powerful ideologies to justify these decisions. In the advanced capitalist countries, racism and nationalism serve this purpose by relegating most of the non-white poor in the world to less than human status. Uncompromising support for immigration rights is crucial precisely because it directly challenges these ideas and policies.
National borders have no place in a rational and humane world. Neither does defending them today solve any of the major or immediate environmental problems, such as global warming or ozone destruction.
National chauvinism, which advocates "protecting" Australia against the waiting hordes (whether they be "foreign" armies or immigrants), has been used very effectively by capitalists throughout Australia's history to pit working people against each other.
By keeping us divided into black and white, English speaking and non-English speaking, within and beyond Australia, they have been able to severely weaken the only force which, if united in the desire for a better world and organised to that end, is capable of getting rid of the private profit system and replacing it with a social system based on human equality and choice, and environmentally sustainable production and consumption.
The struggle to make such unity possible is the main struggle for environmentalists in Australia today.