Why a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation should be Australia’s goal

Tonight, when I was having dinner with my brother and mother, my brother made a stern criticism of my talk about Australia’s sorry greenhouse gas emissions record, revealed by this table from the Climate Change Performance Index. Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkmenistan are major omissions owing to their very high per capita emissions, but the table is still useful even with them omitted and many countries with low total and per capita emissions included.

The position of Australia at the absolute bottom of this list must constitute utter shame for every Australian. Writers like Tim Flannery, Thomas Aquinas McMahon, and Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski have shown that Australia’s ecology is:

1. shaped by soils that – at least amongst Quaternary landmasses – are uniquely ancient, weathered, nutrient-poor and vulnerable to erosion
1. the unique vulnerability to erosion is caused by extreme texture contrasts
2. these in turn are caused by clay accumulation in deep subsoil after 300 million or more years of topsoil leaching
3. most of this leaching occurred in much wetter and hotter climates than found in the Quaternary
2. demanding of extremely low energy consumption by native fauna, and extremely low nutrient requirements for native flora
3. demanding of extremely large territories for native fauna due to the extremely low density of nutritious food and the absence of nutrients that allow effective digestion of cellulose
4. in the case of aquatic organisms, shaped by uniquely high variability in runoff due to extremely low runoff coefficients and absence of baseflow where it is found in similar climates elsewhere
1. this is due to much greater absorption of water by native vegetation compared to similar climates elsewhere on the globe
2. in turn this high water absorption and low runoff component of moisture budgets is due to the need for deep, dense roots to absorb nutrients from ancient soils

These features, especially (2) demand that Australia have by far the world’s lowest per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, not excluding the poorest tropical African nations. They also demand logically that Australia be ranked as incomparably the world’s best country in terms of climate change performance. Both of these stand exactly opposed to Australia’s uniquely bad and worsening performance over the past three decades. An acceptable performance – even factoring in that many of the highest-performing countries could reasonably have been omitted – would have required Australia completely decarbonise so early as 2005.

Following on from groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation, and the Democratic Socialist Party, I have long assumed that by expropriating the wealth and profits of Australia’s major corporate greenhouse emitters, rapid and total decarbonisation of Australia would prove easy to plan and execute, chiefly by transferring from cars and coal to renewable energy and electric mass transit, complete cessation of land clearing, and large-scale revegetation of degraded farmland with native flora.

However, this evening, my brother said I had severely neglected the impact of the meat industry, and said I did so because I enjoy eating meat despite its major impacts via greenhouse gas emissions and using Australia’s uniquely scarce water resources. Consider that the volume of water carried by all mainland Australian rivers south of the Tropic of Capricorn – draining around four and a half million square kilometres – is only four-fifths that carried by the Kaladan, a river draining an area half the size of Tasmania.

I have long held that the environmental impacts of food grown abroad are negligible vis-à-vis analogous food grown in Australia because:

1. water resources overseas average around fifteen times as intense per unit area as the water resources of Australia south of the Tropic of Capricorn
2. required storage sizes for the same total draft in the same climate in Australia are (approximately) 7.3 times as large as for Europe, East Asia, the Americas or New Zealand
1. in fact, because of Australia’s high evaporation rates during dry spells due to advection of dry air from the interior, the figure of 7.3 times larger is most definitely an understatement
3. soils in the Enriched World (extratropical northern and western hemispheres) and the younger parts of the Tropical World are almost all under 10,000 years old and are rapidly replaced when eroded or damaged by new soil
4. in contrast, the topsoil of Australia was mostly formed over 300,000,000 years ago during the Carboniferous and is not replaced if eroded or damaged: instead, the landscape is permanently denuded, gullied and/or salinised
5. Australia’s oceans have – according to on old atlas that I was given by one of my father’s sisters – less than one-tenth the animal plankton density of seas in the same latitudes of Europe, East Asia, or the Americas
6. the requirements of Australian soils for the nutrient elements in which they are severely deficient compared to all other present-day landmasses can produce ecologically dangerous eutrophication during large floods, and also make land unsuitable for native flora and fauna
7. Australia’s native trees are extremely efficient at storing carbon in the absence of large-scale bushfires, vis-à-vis shorter-lived and more easily browsed Enriched and Tropical World trees
8. climate change has already substantially aridified Australia’s major agricultural areas, and as it further does so, larger areas of sub-marginal land of high conservation value might be cleared
1. ironically, this last point is most likely to be an issue if global warming makes present conservations reserves unsuitable for the species they were proclaimed to protect

These differences are much more severe for animal foods (including fish) than for annual plant foods, and much more for annual plant foods than for perennial plant foods. Contrary to the implicit attitude of many vegetarians, non-meat animal foods are equally or more unsustainable in the Australian environment as meat itself. Milk production uses more water and nutrients than meat, and fish is so unsustainable in Australia’s warm, oligotrophic oceans that many Aboriginal groups developed absolute taboos against fish eating, but not against meat. Australia is indeed so nutrient-poor that any population density above 0.1 people per square kilometre cannot be ecologically sustained by local nutrient resources unless the diet be de jure and de facto vegan. This means no animal foods would be eaten whatsoever and that law and/or custom also mandate no animal foods be eaten. The pre-industrial human history of Australia (see here), however, reflects that a vegan diet based on local resources would be impossibly poor nutritionally.

Contrariwise, in the Enriched World production of animal foods has exceedingly small comparative impact, so veganism becomes of itself a form of consumerism that helps divert food production into more fragile lands.

The only real argument against a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation of Australia is transport energy costs. Whilst these must not be dismissed, I have generally thought that with major improvements to fuel efficiency of ocean and rail transport, and even of intercontinental air transport, these problems could certainly be overcome to a substantial degree, and that even if they were not entirely overcome the gains in terms of conservation of Australia’s land and elimination of emissions from land clearing would make it justifiable.

The complete protection of Australia’s ancient soils and uniquely structured ecosystems would give a completely new and much truer image of Australia to outsides – an image of a continent whose ecological and even climatic structure is much closer to (if not perfectly representative of) the Earth during its predominant geological history as an ice-free oligotrophic planet. This history is not known to most of the world’s population, and is not well-understood even by ecologists, but that it needs to be known there is no doubt.