Fragile environments: moral and ethical responsibility

Moreover, from the perspective of the traditional Chinese conception of the “energy” of the land, both China and Northern America are abundantly fertile due to the extent of their associated mountain ranges (the Himalayas, Appalachians and Rockies), which produce an abundance of water as rivers and streams and also a great deal of top soil.

This has allowed humanity in these places to thrive using a logic of short-term advantage - at least until late imperial times in China. In contrast, Indigenous Australians had to cope with much harsher conditions, but the evidence indicates that there has been a human presence in Australia for some 50-60,000 years, which would indicate more than a little adaptive success.

The environmental history of Australia over the past 200 years of settlement by peoples from the Northern Hemisphere has seen what I would dub, following Elvin, “The Two Hundred Year War”.

Because war and a logic of short-term advantage had served the various Northern Hemisphere cultures of the new arrivals so well in their comparatively benign northern environments, the settlers in Australia were blind to the consequences of using “northern” science in such a fragile environment.

Over 200 years later, we are witness to widespread salinisation from misguided irrigation projects, streams and rivers filled with poisonous algal blooms because of the extensive use of fertilisers, and the environmental devastation wreaked by rabbits, cane toads and hoofed animals.

The wife of a Philadelphian professor of the history of science in China once asked me why we had no Johnny Appleseed myth in Australia. I replied without hesitation that it was because he would have died of thirst after three days in the Australian outback and all the apple seeds that he would have planted would have withered and died.

We must learn from our unforgiving environment that Australians have to work together for all of us to survive. The geography and geology are creating an attitude that is, hopefully, beginning to see that arguments of short-term advantage are anathema to the survival of the species.

I argue that the ethical responsibility of our “southern” culture is to point out the delicacy of ecology to regional partners whose comparatively fecund environments and economic circumstances do not encourage them to see past the short term to the real effects of such practices as widespread deforestation.

Beyond this, our ethical responsibility is to let be known the real and dire consequences of allowing the workings of society to be oiled by war and the prospect of short-term advantage.