Temperate forest conference
Your feature article on the threat to our native forests (GL #82)had a photo of David Bellamy described as a "world renowned botanist".
I urge all readers to regard with extreme caution and cynicism Green media personalities such as David Bellamy, Robyn Williams and even David Suzuki.
David Bellamy, the one-time hero of the Franklin, recently did a long run of TV commercials for mousse and yoghurt.
He is featured holding up containers of these products in front of children telling viewers how healthy they are.
The products are in disposable plastic containers. Worse still they are small unit packaging.
Throwaway plastics are an environmental menace with long term effects that are as yet unknown. Our beaches are littered with plastic which harms marine life by entering the digestive tracts of marine animals. Plastic packaging on our tips gives off trace amounts of dioxin when burnt and contributes to atmospheric warming.
Anybody lining their pockets by personally promoting plastics should not be considered green — including the "world renowned botanist" David Bellamy. He is a phoney.
Robyn Williams of the ABC Science Show is also a careerist masquerading as an environmentalist.
His Science Show ran a basically promotional programme on the Bicentennial Rainforest Conservatory. This imposing and extravagant dome was recently constructed in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. It houses a pseudo-rainforest and was built by the government to raise public awareness of the importance of rainforests.
This building is partially sponsored by Mitsubishi whose advertising adorns the establishment. This is despite the fact that Mitsubishi owns vast logging concessions in S.E. Asia and is one of the top ten importers of rainforest timber into Japan.
On behalf of the Rainforest Action Group I wrote to the conservatory board requesting the removal of Mitsubishi's advertising from the building. They refused.
I then wrote to Robyn Williams requesting air time for the Rainforest Action Group to put their case on his show. We received no reply. When I phoned him he flatly refused to give us air time saying, "There is nothing you can do about it, corporations sponsor everything".
So much for investigative fair reporting!
Ian Grayson
Mile End SA
'Scientism'
I write with considerable concern about the rise in "scientism" in matters of the environment by some writing for GLW.
The most recent example was the letter of Diana Evans, GLW #79. Diana asserts the formula I=PAT as a definitive explanation for the current state of the environment. Another example was the recent "reply" to Reihana Mohideen's article on population, which rested its argument on certain supposedly irrefutable scientific arguments, particularly carrying capacity.
On the one hand the formula quoted (a relic from Paul Ehrlich) is now considered crude, even by Ehrlich himself! On the other hand, there is no hard evidence that the "natural" concept of carrying capacity may be applied to humanity. What about permaculture for instance?
Invoking scientific homilies like these has the effect only of stifling debate, which is the very thing we don't need now.
Graham Matthews
Newcastle NSW
Population
Peter Boyle, in "Scapegoating Can't Save the Planet", Nov. 11, in response to Jennifer Goldie's "Population and the Environment" of Oct. 28, sets out in high dudgeon to resurrect the case that maldistribution of global resources rather than growth in populations and per capita consumption as well as maldistribution is the principal cause of increasing ecological and social crises.
Boyle's moralistic reduction of global crises to mainly political causes runs counter to every major population environment study of the past year, such as that of the Royal Society of London and the US National Academy of Sciences, Paul Harrison's "The Third Revolution", the recent "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity", and, in Australia, the National Population Council's Recommendations and the ESD process.
To argue from the UN population fund's figures that this planet could sustain 14 billion with improved equity for the third world and organic farming is ludicrous. It would require the conversion of all remaining wilderness and wildlife habitats to farmland and an astronomical rise in consumption of non-renewable resources and waste sinks. The consensus among soil scientists, marine biologists, climatologists and ecologists is that even with a substantial reduction in the first world's resource and sink consumption and a modest rise in third world equity, the chronic damage already wrought on the biosphere and atmosphere would be increasingly compounded by the current 5 billion. At 14 billion, demanding greater resource access to the third world with reduced first world consumption, Boyle seriously contemplates trebling the prevailing population impact.
Boyle's moralising will not save the planet. It will not avert the multiplying effect of population on the environment, however be. His children and theirs will not thank him for scorning a regulated immigration intake which enables Australians to live within their environmental means and to maintain an economy which provides aid and food for an overpopulated and degraded world.
Graham Caldersmith
O'Connor ACT
[Edited for length.]
'Auto-anthropocide'
The Northern Territory Conservation Commission is trying to re-introduce the mala wallaby into a habitat that is so changed from its original state that it can no longer support the mala.
The Conservation Commission would be better advised to campaign to prevent the introduction of any more exotic animals, such as those at Tipperary station, with the potential to displace or destroy more native wildlife.
They could also campaign to prevent the introduction of foreign plants, particularly improved pastures, which, like mimosa pigra and salvinia, have the potential to destroy the habitats of many more native life-forms, none of which is as cute and cuddly as the mala, but which are essential parts of the web of life.
Humanity could, but won't, draw lessons from this. What we have done to the mala, by destroying the capability of its environment to support its existence, is exactly what we are doing to our own environment, and we will suffer the same fate.
We can call it auto-anthropocide.
C.M. Friel
Alawa NT