Marina Carman
Population: no simplistic solutions
We live in a world in crisis. A world plagued by pollution of air, seas, land, food and drinking water. A world of ozone depletion, deforestation and global warming. It's an international problem. There are solutions, but there are also some very wrong ways to turn.
This was clearly demonstrated on Triple J radio station two weeks ago in an interview with a representative of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population and US theoretician Paul Ehrlich. According to them, the primary solution to the environment crisis is to limit population, particularly in the Third World. What they proposed for Australia was a patriotic campaign to limit families to two children, to close Australia's borders to immigrants and to cut family payments after the second child.
Overpopulation is undoubtedly a problem and is something that needs to be addressed. But first we have to look at why it happens.
It is an understatement to say that things are hard in the Third World. Grinding poverty brought about by debts to First World banks, where interest payments alone can take up to 50% of government revenue, means that people have to resort to felling trees for fuel, to grazing land until it is barren and useless, to accepting contracts to dispose of First World toxic waste.
Large families are a matter of survival in the Third World, to provide for people in their old age and help with simply eking out an existence. Where a nation's GDP increases, the rise in living standards means that people don't need this "insurance policy" and population growth decreases.
Despite what the populationists argue, it's not a matter of how many people. We have enough food, resources and technology to provide for all the world's population adequately and even cope with an increase. It's a matter of distribution of resources on a world scale. While the wealthy countries and transnational companies continue to eat up the major share, to dump grain and burn stockpiles to keep world market prices high, to continue trade and debt arrangements which keep the Third World poor, population will be a problem and the environment crisis will worsen.
How should we be reacting to this in Australia? We are amongst the nations that can best afford to adopt environmentally sound practices, but our government, like those of all other First World nations, puts profit and the interests of polluting corporations before the health of the planet and its people, forgetting the promises it made at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and paying the environment little more than lip service.
In the light of this, it seems almost farcical to suggest limiting immigration as a solution. Even leaving aside criticisms of its racist implications, it is extremely simplistic. If we close our borders to immigrants, does that mean that pollution, the ozone hole and global warming will stop there too?
We can't solve the problem by turning against those outside our national boundaries. Ordinary people the world over have to work together to stop environmental destruction by big corporations and their friends in government. Together, we can demand a say in the decisions which affect us, a say in our future.
[Marina Carman is a member of the Environmental Youth Alliance in Sydney.]