The “immigration gap” in settler nations

Today, discussing the fate of the VFL’s “soccer belt” problem children in 1960s — South Melbourne, North Melbourne, Footscray and Fitzroy —one thing occurred to me whilst I was discussing with my brother and a former Penleigh friend the southern and eastern European immigration that eroded those clubs’ supporter bases. I had long presumed this post-World War II migration wave to be largely driven by migrants fleeing Stalinism, although a large proportion was from non-Stalinist Greece and Italy.

An oddity is that, whilst there was large-scale migration from:

1. the northern Stalinist nations of the Baltic States, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, and Hungary and
   
2. the Balkan nations of the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania

there was, at least before Stalinism collapsed, very little or no migration from the intermediate nations of Romania and Bulgaria. My brother agreed with me on this — he knew people from Greece, Yugoslavia and the countries listed in (1), but no one of Bulgarian ancestry and only one person of Romanian ancestry. Looking at Wikipedia, although the figures are substantially distorted by migration since the collapse of Stalinism, one does see how small the Romanian and Bulgarian diasporas in Australia remain.

A similar situation prevails on the opposite shore of the Black Sea. There is virtually no (Stalinist-era or earlier) Georgian diaspora in Australia or other colonial settler nations, but large Armenian diasporas.

This interesting fact my brother suggested to be because it was easier to emigrate from Yugoslavia and Greece than from Stalinist nations more closely connected to Russia. However, as we discussed, that makes little sense because Enver Hoxha’s Albania was much harder to migrate from than Russia-allied Stalinist countries, yet still saw significant migration.

What my brother did point out was that the lack of pre-existing communities may have prevented immigration from Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia. This is  of course logical, but it does not explain how these immigrant communities developed in the first place. A quite convincing argument, more than the first two, is that Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia had more flat land and thus fewer people were pushed from the land by land reform or farm consolidation than in the Balkans or Armenia. Although they possessed even more flat land than Romania, Bulgaria or Georgia, the more northerly Stalinist nations’ peoples  established populations in the settler states during the late nineteenth century, which created opportunities for further immigration due to the existence of communities with familiar food and culture.

Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection

Although I have known of Wendell Berry, a controversial though admired farmer and writer from Kentucky’s Henry County, since the 1990s, it is only today when browsing through Front Porch Republic that I discovered this list titled “Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection: the poet and environmental activist recommends inspiring works about how to interact with the land”.

1. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by F. H. King
2. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith 
3. An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard
4. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
5. Home Place: Essays on Ecology by Stan Rowe
6. Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson

I find some of the choices especially revealing in a world where the free market directs agriculture to the very countries possessing the oldest, most leached, and most infertile soils alongside the scarcest and most unreliable water resources. As early as 2008 James Kenneth Galbraith in his The Predatory State hinted at the problems posed by specialising in agriculture, although without any consideration of the disadvantages specialisers in agriculture actually have relative to countries with immense comparative disadvantage in agriculture.

The first book on the list, published in 1929 before the “Green Revolution” intensified the Enriched World’s comparative disadvantage in agriculture, illustrates how it is possible to sustain agriculture in favourable climates and young soils. The second illustrates why annual crops are ill-suited outside the Enriched World except in certain Tropical World regions of unusually fertile soils that share the Enriched World’s general agricultural comparative disadvantage. The third, fifth and sixth books appear less interesting, whilst A Sand County Almanac is a familiar American environmental classic which I have never read.

All in all, these books do illustrate the way in which intensive farming was sustained in the Enriched World, which has bene the success of the localist and organic farming movements. Their failure has been to not recognise the ipso facto unsustainability of farming many regions – all of Australia and many parts of Africa, tropical Asia and non-Hispanophone South America – and to campaign for appropriate land uses in these regions. Without appropriate land use and new economies in these regions of almost universal extreme comparative advantage in agriculture, we cannot solve the global ecological crisis.

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.

A final proof the “March on Canberra” is a quarter-century and counting overdue

According to a new paper in the journal Nature, regardless of what the rest of the world does, record-breaking temperature rises are already inevitable until 2040.

At the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald is noting a zero-emissions plan for Britain – whose parity emissions per capita are minimally four times those of Australia – as Australia approves the polluting Adani coal mine. There is – and was even before last month’s surprise election – a certainty Australia will expand fossil fuels whilst the EU moves to zero-net-emissions.

Many (including my brother) naïvely believe that Australia will eventually be condemned as a pariah state for expanding fossil fuels. Nevertheless, this viewpoint overlooks demographic reality. Australia already has substantially higher total fertility than those nations most advanced in decarbonisation. Recent trends towards lowest-low fertility in Finland (from 1.9 to 1.5 children since 2010) and other European nations whose fertility was the least low during the 2000s suggests that Morrison’s policies will widen this gap.

The fact is that – as I have emphasised for two decades – Australia must ecologically have by far the lowest emissions per capita in the world. This demand places human energy consumption upon its natural biological “footing”. Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated three decades ago that the money existed to finance a rapid transition to a carbon-free Australia as early as 2005 or 2010 – were major polluters taxed severely enough.

As Dimitri Lafleur has partially shown, a carbon-free Australia would remake the world economy by:

1. radically limiting energy and materials use on a global scale, especially in desert nations with naturally low-energy ecologies and zero hydropower potential
2. shifting “developing” economies towards renewable energy once they do not have cheap fossil fuels from Australia and the oil states
3. shifting energy-intensive industries towards those (Enriched and Tropical) nations with large resources in hydropower
4. shifting agriculture towards the high-latitude nations with youngest and most fertile soils
1. this would occur because land clearing is a major source (around 20 percent) of greenhouse emissions in Australia
2. also, Australian soils are thirty thousand times older and more weathered than soils of most other Quaternary landmasses
3. young, high-latitude areas are also least affected by runaway climate change shown as certain by Nature
5. shifting away from planned obsolescence towards long-lasting consumer goods that use fewer resources over the long term

What needed to be done back in the 1990s was for the globe to recognise that – regardless of its relatively small aggregate emissions that have led even environmentalists to neglect it – a rigid, zero-compromise, zero-emissions target for Australia no later than 2010 would have:

1. largely solved global greenhouse gas emissions by radically altering global development patterns
2. paid for the ecological crisis out of the pockets of those people – alongside the Arab Gulf royal families – with greatest duty and ability to pay
3. achieved this in a manner in agreement with Earth’s natural ecology (smallest per-capita energy consumption and emissions in arid desert nations)
4. in an Enriched World then and now crippled by excessive environmental regulations, which stand likely to achieve negligible global gains while Australia mines and uses more and more coal, created major economic opportunities including:
• phase-out of economically crippling Enriched World farm subsidies as Australia’s unsustainable pastoral and broad-acre farmland would be converted to ecotourism
• revitalising such industries as aluminum and titanium smelting when coal use in phased out in Australia and other nations lacking hydropower potential

Given the experiences of the past quarter-century and especially last month’s election, there exists zero possibility that Australia will ever elect a more environmentally responsive government. Thus, other countries are burdened with the critical task of clamping down on the worst environmental performer – a task entirely ignored but unless achieved even a total carbon phase-out in the EU and East Asia will achieve little in the long term.

Instead of decentralised global environmental protests (as seen in recent weeks) what was needed in 1994 and stands three decades overdue was and is a global focus upon the centre of power in the worst environmental performer: protests demanding uncompromising, rapid decarbonisation of Australia, or a “March on Canberra”. Whilst the effects would not be immediate, would be costly to the rest of the world and would need to be sustained over years and even decades, they possess potential to actually deal with the planet’s worst polluter rather than permit Australia indefinite emissions increases negating large-scale decarbonisation abroad.

The lag between tropical expansion and rainfall shifts – is it to disappear?

Synoptic chart for Sunday. Note the subtropical high pressure belt located around 48°S, around eight degrees south of its historic summer position

For over a decade now, I have noticed a major gap between the observed expansion of the tropics (Seidel et. al, 2008) and observed poleward shifts in rainfall in the southern hemisphere. A combination of observed measurements of the poleward edge of the Hadley Circulation suggests an expansion of eight degrees since the 1950s. Whilst as the following table for a representative set of stations in southern Australia and Central Chile shows, rain belts have shifted poleward – to disastrous effect for the water supplies of Perth – the shifts have not been nearly so marked as would be predicted from simply moving each locality seven to eight degrees equatorward:

Station	Virgin mean rainfall (beginning of record to 1974)	Mean rainfall predicted from simple 7.5˚ poleward tropical expansion	Percentage decline vis-à-vis virgin mean rainfall	Actual lowest observed rainfall
Santiago de Chile (MJJA)	272.0 mm	15 mm	94.48%	22.1 mm*
				37.2 mm
Concepción (annual)	1230.3 mm	121.6 mm	90.12%	598.6 mm
				599.3 mm
Valdivia (annual)	2393.5 mm	275 mm	88.51%	1033.1 mm
Perth (annual)	882.0 mm	233.2 mm	73.56%	466.6 mm
Perth (MJJA)	624.9 mm	158.0 mm	74.72%	260.2 mm
Collie (MJJA)	667.0 mm	140.8 mm	78.89%	275.9 mm
				296.3 mm
Manjimup (annual)	1055.6 mm	248.5 mm	72.73%	549.0 mm
Horsham Polkemmet Road (annual)	450.8 mm	185.0 mm	58.96%	181.1 mm

An asterisk (*) indicates that the record low rainfall occurred before 1974. MJJA (May-June-July-August) refers to the May to August period that constitutes the rainy season in Southwest Western Australia and Central Chile.

As we can see, the annual rainfall one would expect from a 7.5˚ poleward shift in all climate belts remains less than the driest observed year for all selected stations except Horsham Polkemmet Road (BOM 079023). Even there the driest observed year – 1982 – is only a few millimetres drier than the estimated mean. In addition, the stations used to model Wimmera rainfall under a 7.5˚ poleward shift in climate belts suggest it likely that the median would be under 181 millimetres even with a mean of 185 millimetres.

One major problem is that Central Chile rainfall was historically limited much more by unfavourable land-ocean temperature gradients than by the descending limb of the Hadley Cell. The dryness of the El Niño years of 2014, 2015, and 2018 suggest, however, that such is emphatically not the case beyond the 2010 “magic gate”. The implication is that current ongoing expansion of the Hadley Cell sets a rigid ceiling upon Central Chile rainfall in a manner absent even during the 2000s, when Santiago exceeded its maximum 2010s MJJA rainfall of 209.9 millimetres in four non-El Niño years (2000, 2001, 2005 and 2008). Another problem is that the topography and coastal shape 7.5˚ closer to the equator differ from those surrounding the stations listed, although I was careful to choose those stations least likely to be controlled by differences of this type.

What is revealing about the last three months – in which Melbourne has seen only 33 millimetres with little hope for more in the foreseeable future – is that the subtropical anticyclone has been located as far south as 48˚S (see synoptic map at top). If we combine the subtropical anticyclone’s historic summer position and the known expansion of the Hadley Cell since the 1950s, 48 degrees South is almost precisely where we would expect the summer subtropical anticyclone to be today. This has suggested to me that we will be observing a “catch up” of rainfall belts with the observed shifts of the Hadley Cell since the 1950s (Seidel et. al, 2008, Liu et. al, 2012, plus personal communication). Should this be correct, rainfalls in Southwest Western Australia, southeastern Australia and Central Chile will, beginning this year, show dramatic declines below 2010s averages. These 2010s averages are already 30 percent below virgin averages before man-made greenhouse emissions expanded the Hadley Cell, and 50 percent less in the Santiago region.

Given widespread predictions of another record El Niño in 2019, annual rainfalls in southern Australia of one-half or even one-quarter existing record lows appear even at this early stage a probable outcome if we study the above tables. Even if positive Indian Ocean Dipole and negative Southern Oscillations are less persistent than some models (e.g. Chie et. al. 2008) suggest, there is still a likelihood that the frontal rain belt will be wholly shifted beyond any part of mainland Australia by the “catch up” noted in the previous paragraph.

The implications for public and private farming policy of a 7.5˚ or larger shift in annual rainfalls are stark. The winter rain belt would become wholly extinct, and with it rainfed winter grain crops – a complete 2019/2020 crop failure throughout southern Australia already appears plausible. Irrigated crops would also likely disappear. The rainfall declines modelled at the beginning of this article would certainly mean zero median annual runoff (Chiew et. al. 2006) for every river in Australia’s historic winter rainfall zone.

What governments would do confronted with this situation and powerful agribusinesses demanding bailouts from certain severe financial losses is not worth imagining. Expensive schemes to redirect runoff from other parts of Australia, or desalination and pipelines, would create still more disastrous after-effects in greenhouse gas emissions and disturbance to sensitive and unique river ecologies. Nonetheless, I still think it plausible that agribusiness possesses sufficient power to gain such bailouts, tragic as they would be not only for Australia’s ecology but for the remainder of the globe. It would even speak ill of Australia if it were to abandon farming because of catastrophic climate change rather than as a result of recognising it as inherently unsustainable on our uniquely ancient soils.

Rainfall methodology:

To estimate rainfall in Central Chile and Southern Australia under a 7.5˚ of latitude poleward shift of rain belts:

1. rainfall stations with the most similar topography and coastal aspect to land 7.5˚ northward were selected
2. rainfall for stations 7.5˚ northward and the most similar coastal aspect for the period before the first “magic gate” in 1975/1976 was entered for the stations in (1)
1. for stations in southwestern WA, stations in BOM District 6 (West Gascoyne) were chosen, and for Collie (009628) and Manjimup (009573) stations comparably distant from the coast were used
2. for Collie (009628) and Manjimup (009573) the estimated rainfall under a 7.5˚ poleward shift was increased by 10 percent to account for the Darling Scarp orographic effect.
3. for Perth, data from Carnarvon (006062 and 006011) were used without alteration
4. for Horsham Polkemmet Road, stations in BOM district 46 (Western—Far Northwest) were used
5. for stations in Chile, stations on the coast or nearby 7.5˚ northward were used

References:

• Chandler, Mark A.; Rind, David and Rüdy, Reto; ‘Pangaean climate during the Early Jurassic: GCM simulations and the sedimentary record of paleoclimate’; Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 104 (May 1992), p. 543-559
• Chie Ihara; Yochana Kushnir and Mark A. Cane; ‘Warming Trend of the Indian Ocean SST and Indian Ocean Dipole from 1880 to 2004’; Journal of Climate, vol. 21 (2008), pp. 2035-2046
• Chiew, Francis; Peel, Murray; McMahon, Thomas Aquinas and Siriwardena, Lionel (2006); ‘Precipitation elasticity of streamflow in catchments across the world’; [Harry Lins, Richard Vogel, Mike Bonell, Wolfgang Grabs et al.; WMO/UNESCO WCP-Water, FRIEND 2006, Havana Cuba, 26 November-1 December 2006]
• Hochman, Zvi; Gobbett, David L.; and Horan, Heidi; ‘Climate trends account for stalled wheat yields in Australia since 1990’; Global Change Biology (2017); published by CSIRO Agriculture and Food
• J. Liu, M. Song, Y. Hu and X. Ren; ‘Changes in the strength and width of the Hadley Circulation since 1871’; Climates of the Past; vol. 8 (2012); pp. 1169-1175
• Seidel, Dian J. Qiang Fu; Randel, William J. and Reichler, Thomas J.; ‘Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate’; Nature Geoscience, vol. 1 (January 2008), pp. 21-24

“Get Out” and don’t “Get Big”

As recent weeks clearly reveal a tipping point in Australia’s climate – with only 33 millimetres of rain in three months in Melbourne and none forecast for the next week – the revelation that the Murray-Darling Basin is drying out is not unexpected but shocking nonetheless.

The carcass of a kangaroo is seen by the side of the road in Wilcannia in March. Livestock and wildlife are dying as a result of the extended drought. Picture: Mark Evans/Getty Images Source: Getty Images

Jed Smith of vice.com and Maryanne Slattery of The Australia Institute have demonstrated in their recent article ‘“These weren’t mistakes”: “Dodgy” policies to blame for Murray Darling’s downfall’ that an Australian National University study demonstrating that vastly less water had been returned to the river system than claimed by the government. Maryanne also revealed large-scale water theft by the factory-scale irrigators in the basin’s upper reaches, who grow the water-intensive crops of rice, tobacco and cotton on a landmass whose rivers lack baseflow during below-average or even average rainfall. Water that in other continents creates baseflow is in Australia absorbed by dense proteoid root systems necessary to absorb scarce nutrients. In other Quaternary landmasses these nutrients have been enriched by orders of magnitude via mountain building and aeolian glacial tills. There, lower rooting densities and much smaller threshold rainfalls to activate runoff are not only possible but essential.

What they show as a requisite is that irrigators – politically powerful due to their unrivalled profits on Australia’s abundant land in wet years – to be absolutely forbidden from extracting purchased water. What has actually happened is that irrigators simply re-buy the water purchased by government, eliminating supposed additional flows. These flows are required to preserve ecosystems 13,000 times more ancient and comparably more precisely adapted that the 10,000-year-old (or younger) ecosystems of Europe, North America or New Zealand. Australian aquatic flora and fauna are adapted to flows three times more variable than those of Europe, North America, New Zealand, East Asia or South America, and lose out when flows are modified to fit farming practices tested in the fleetingly young Enriched World. In fact, as Mary E. White showed in Running Down: Water in a Changing Land, the entire Murray-Darling and Lake Eyre Basins – and indeed most of the higher Western Plateau – constitutes one ephemeral floodplain adapted to extremely irregular floods. This is utterly different not only from the fast-flowing streams in U-shaped valleys of most of the Enriched World, but even from the permanent slow-flowing streams of the Amazon Basin or the bayou country of the Southern United States, whose soils are relatively free of the enrichment found in most Quaternary landmasses outside Australia. In almost all of Australia, runoff occurs only ephemerally following abnormal rainfall, and when rivers do flow, they can cover the whole land area – as in the famous 1990 floods when Nyngan was completely evacuated.

Such environments are simply not designed for annual crops. In the natural state of the MDB, such crops would fail in the vast majority of years, and reservoirs six times those of Europe, North America or New Zealand are needed to maintain the same reliability of supply even ignoring higher evaporation.

Instead of “getting big”, Australia needs a plan for its farmers to get out – and get out as soon as possible. A “get out” plan would involve restoring the rivers of inland Australia to their naturally uniquely variable flows and specially adapted endemic species, and restoring farmland to native flora. This plan was proposed on a smaller scale for uneconomic less large farms two decades ago by Tyrone Thomas in his My Environmental Exposé, but contradicts a free market that locates agriculture where land is cheapest. However, where land is cheapest is precisely where farming does by far the greatest ecological harm. This is why a large-scale, long-term plan to take control of Australia’s rivers from Australian and foreign agribusinesses, and return our climatically vulnerable rainfed farmland to specially adapted native flora and fauna, is one of the most critical steps for reversing the ecological crisis. Benefits of mass revegetation will accrue not only to Australia but globally in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and increased economic profitability on other continents incomparably better suited to agriculture.

Why Australian agriculture is inherently “the wrong kind of farming”

At the beginning of this month, Gracy Olmstead wrote a revealing article in the New York Times by veteran farmer and poet Wendell Berry. Berry has argued for half a century that today’s agricultural practices are detrimental to ecology, and that subsidies to wealthy agribusinesses and factory farms are a major factor in this problem.

Agribusinesses – including, perversely, organic agribusinesses – are today heavily focused on Australia because of its glut of flat land. Australia has by far the largest ratio of “arable” land to population of any country in the world according to the World Bank, a differential increased further when year-round frost-free seasons are factored in. In fact, its ratio, according to an old geography book (Collins Gem Basic Facts Geography) from my childhood, was four times that of any other country in the world. Cost differences between Australia and the rest of the world may be much larger than even the ratios imply because:

1. Australia is extremely flat and its arable land likely to be highly contiguous, producing further efficiency advantages
2. Figures for “arable” land do not take into account the huge areas of low-cost rangeland in the interior and north
3. Effective tax rates – taking into account natural resource abundance – are extremely low in Australia

However, over the past quarter century, ecological studies have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that agriculture in Australia is fundamentally different from agriculture in any other extant continent. All other extant continents largely consist of soils formed from ongoing orogenies or from glaciations ending a mere 10,000 years ago. In contrast, almost all of Australia’s soils have been subject to continuous weathering since the end of the Dwyker Glaciation over 280,000,000 years ago. Most of this weathering has been under hot and humid climates, which were globally general from 250,000,000 to 40,000,000 years ago. Consequently, Australian soils:

1. are extremely sensitive to erosion because of the absence of new soil creation
2. possess unique texture contrasts (subsoils enriched in non-cracking clays) that cause unusual erosion hazard even on flat land
3. are, for the reason noted in (1), a strictly non-renewable resource with a fixed supply of topsoil
1. contrariwise, the great majority of soils in other present-day landmasses are renewed constantly via glacial tills, volcanic ashes or alluvia from the Alpine Orogeny
4. are with insignificant overlap depleted in nutrients essential to the production of dense heterotrophic biomass. These elements are:
   1. extremely scarce in the crust relative to their solar abundances
   2. geochemically mainly chalcophile
   3. form weak bonds with oxygen
   4. either:
      1. formed the “primitive” elements known before the birth of Christ or;
      2. were unknown only because they could not be separated from such “primitive” elements
   5. highly efficient at coordinating with carbon and nitrogen, so that they are permit breakdown (catabolism) of large organic molecules like cellulose from plants

Combining Olmstead and Berry’s discussion of topsoil loss as inherent in high-input agriculture with the points above demonstrates that Australian agriculture produces uniquely high losses of wholly irreplaceable topsoil and wholly irreplaceable species. This is even more true when one factors in the extremely high Australian runoff variability, even in humid regions. Aborigines, even if Bruce Pascoe be correct that they extensively modified the landscape to increase food production in some parts of Australia, never attempted the growth of annual crops as has been normal for indigenous peoples almost everywhere else in the world. The extremely ancient soils and erratic rainfall meant that before industrial agriculture Australian subsistence was necessarily based on perennial plants – never as abundant or nutritious as annual plant or animal foods – whose productivity could be spread out over many years at low nutrient requirements.

If Australian land be sustainably managed, it cannot therefore be used for production of ill-adapted annual plants, nor for equally nutrient-intense animal protein. This of itself limits potentially “right” farming in Australia to perennial tree crops, but as noted in point (2) above most soils in agricultural districts are too clay-rich for unspecialised trees. The absence of deciduous trees outside the small glaciated areas of highland Tasmania – much too cold and wet for agriculture – further narrows possibilities. This – even theoretically – means any agriculture must be specialised evergreen tree crops like tropical fruit, and the peculiarities of northern Australia’s climate make even these highly dubious as “sustainable” or “right” farming.

What Peter Mailler is doing must be encouraged generally

With Melbourne yesterday receiving no rainfall despite a predicted 90 percent chance of showers and a practical certainty of:

1. a rainless October, with the previous record low 7 millimetres in 1914 easily smashed
2. a record dry spring, with the previous record low of 68 millimetres from 1967 cut to a third of that figure or less
3. a record dry three months, beating 23.9 millimetres from February to April 1923
4. a record dry October to December, beating 52 millimetres from 2006 and 67.7 millimetres under natural climate cycles from 1896
5. much more critically, a radical shift in the Hadley circulation producing a reduction of between 50 and 80 percent under the virgin mean annual rainfall of around 660 millimetres or 26 inches

In corresponding latitudes of South America, the entire region of Central Chile between Santiago and Concepción has seen a reduction of 40 percent in mean annual rainfall since 2009, on top of past reductions since 1967. This is almost certainly entirely a product of due to man-made greenhouse pollution shifting the descending limb of the Hadley Cell into the region during its former winter rainy season (e.g. Hochman et.al 2017, Liu et.al 2012, Seidel et.al 2008). Because extreme positive IOD events that have caused the droughts in 2002, 2006 to 2008, 2014 to 2015 and 2018 are likely to become vastly more frequent (Ng et.al., 2015; Chie et. al 2004), a 50 to 80 percent reduction in annual rainfall over Southern Australia vis-à-vis virgin means is an entirely reasonable prediction for 2019 and beyond. With continuing increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, one needs to err on the dry side, as it is known that during the Mesozoic with CO₂ concentrations over 1,000ppmv the Hadley Cell extended to at least 45˚ from the equator (vis-à-vis 25˚ preindustrially).

In this context, the admission by former farmer Peter Mailler of Goondiwindi on the Darling downs on yesterday’s 7:30 Report that:

“You can’t keep arguing that this is just a cycle,”

“Yes, there are dry periods and, yes, there are wetter periods, yes, there are warm periods, yes, there are cool periods, but we have shifted the averages.”

 “The baselines have moved to the point now where we are unable to manage the impacts of those extreme events in that set.”

“We’re running out of tricks”

 “Agriculture is a gamble and every time temperatures rise and the impacts of climate change rolls down, the odds keep moving in favour of the house. My bet is that high temperatures are here to stay and that is a serious threat to how we farm and how we manage that lack of rainfall.”

What Mr. Mailler is doing is to build a solar farm on his property and sell the electricity. According to the 7:30 Report, Mailler is producing enough electricity for the entire town of Goondiwindi. The report said that, despite the government’s inaction and deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, Mailler is actually making money.

There is a deep lesson here. Mailler’s work possesses simple logic, yet I had never previously thought of solar power stations as an alternative use for the vast majority of Australian farmland that is unsustainable both in terms of biodiversity loss and runaway expansion of the Hadley circulation.

If, in an area which lies near the boundary of the humid western side of the subtropical anticyclone and is not nearly so vulnerable to runaway poleward spread of the Hadley Cell, farmers are nonetheless struggling, what could be done if we could cut Australia’s politicians’ subservience to the coal industry and pay farmers in the former winter rainfall zone to make a change to solar power and large-scale revegetation of their properties?? Large-scale power for communities much larger than Goondiwindi is certainly not implausible with the certainty of Melbourne’s rainfall and cloudiness from 2019 being consistently below historical averages in Tibooburra. Changing farming to native flora and solar power constitutes a double jackpot is reducing Australia’s uniquely bad greenhouse emissions via:

1. reversing large-scale emissions of greenhouse gases from extensive and continuing clearing of native vegetation by agribusiness
2. vastly reducing, even eliminating emissions from coal-fired power stations

What Mailler is doing needs to be demanded of all Australian farmers.

References:

• Hochman, Zvi; Gobbett, David L.; and Horan, Heidi; ‘Climate trends account for stalled wheat yields in Australia since 1990’; Global Change Biology (2017); published by CSIRO Agriculture and Food
• Chie Ihara; Yochana Kushnir and Mark A. Cane; ‘Warming Trend of the Indian Ocean SST and Indian Ocean Dipole from 1880 to 2004’; Journal of Climate, vol. 21 (2008), pp. 2035-2046
• J. Liu, M. Song, Y. Hu and X. Ren; ‘Changes in the strength and width of the Hadley Circulation since 1871’; Climates of the Past; vol. 8 (2012); pp. 1169-1175
• Ng, Benjamin; Cai, Wenju; Walsh, Kevin and Santoso, Agus; ‘Nonlinear processes reinforce extreme Indian Ocean Dipole events’; Scientific Reports; volume 5, Article 11697 (2015)
• Seidel, Dian J. Qiang Fu; Randel, William J. and Reichler, Thomas J.; ‘Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate’; Nature Geoscience, vol. 1 (January 2008), pp. 21-24

Why Coles’ drought levy is a con job

On the radio during September one would frequently see advertisements for a “drought levy” established by Coles on milk since the beginning of September, and for Coles aiding drought-stricken farmers.

With a record-dry year likely now from Melbourne into northern Victoria and possibly parts of New South Wales, the drought levy is understandable but in terms of environmental ethics – regardless of its good intentions to help farmers – it must be judged wrong.

The reality is that we – as Tim Flannery noted during the 2006 drought – are not seeing a drought at all, but a new climate. Scientific studies (Seidel et. al. 2007, Kidder et. al. 2004, Liu et. al. 2012) suggest the southern Hadley cell – which marks the limits of the outer tropical and subtropical arid belt – has shifted poleward by seven degrees of latitude since the 1960s. This is equivalent to 780 kilometres, or to Melbourne experiencing the climate of Moree or Walgett from before anthropogenic global warming, and can be seen in the intense anticyclonic circulation during the winter half-year below:

Winter half-year 850 millibar streamfunction over Australia since 2010 vis-à-vis before 1974 (courtesy of Earth System Research Laboratory’s NCEP NCAR R1)

These climatic changes have been uniform over the southern hemisphere, although the mapping at ESRL did not allow me to show a decent graph. Also, the intensity of the Hadley Cell in the southern hemisphere has increased steadily since the 1920s – and the increase since 2010 has been very large vis-à-vis the graph below:

Strength of Southern Hemisphere Hadley circulation, taken from J. Liu, M. Song, Y. Hu and X. Ren; ‘Changes in the strength and width of the Hadley Circulation since 1871’; Climates of the Past; vol. 8 (2012); pp. 1169–1175

In this context, the levies of Coles and Woolworths serve no other long-term purpose except to prop up dairy farmers who are already clearly unsustainable and likely to suffer even more as the Hadkey Cell spreads in the future. Models from the extremely hot Mesozoic (Chander et. al. 1992; Kidder et. al. 2004) suggest that the rapid poleward movement of winter storms away from the subtropics will continue with increasing global warming. This aridification must make the possibility of southern Australian farmers continuing to farm without causing mass extinctions of unique, ancient species remote. Indeed Hochman et.al. (2016) have suggested that poleward shifts of the Hadley Cell will inevitably stall and reverse technological grain crop yield increases in Australia during the 21st century.

There is, in my view, a much more sustainable alternative to propping up unsustainable land uses. Those concerned abut helping Australia’s farmers should aim not to prop them up, but to permit them make a radical transition via (at least partial and preferably complete) revegetation of their farms to ecotourism based land uses which mitigate rather than exacerbate man-made climate changes. A transition from unprofitable or erratically profitable farming to ecotourism would also reduce the risk of extinction for extremely ancient species that – unlike the rapidly speciating northern and western hemispheres – play irreplaceable roles in ecosystem function. For instance, lyrebirds play a critical role mitigating the intense fires (Nugent et. al., 2014) caused by scarcity of catabolic chalcophile elements in southern Australia (Orians and Milewski, 2007)

Whilst a transition from farming to ecotourism stands costly and difficult over the vast areas where the threats noted by Hochman et. al. are severe, certainly on a small scale conversion of struggling farmers to sustainable ecotourism – especially with currently underutilised public and private promotion of the unique characteristics of Australian ecosystems (Orians and Milewski, 2007; Flannery 1994; McMahon and Finlayson 1991) – would be a much more sustainable use of “relief” levies from sales of food in chain stores, and would mitigate the risks of future climate change that see drying possibly as extreme as 80 percent of virgin mean rainfalls by 2100.

References:

• Chandler, Mark A., Rind, David and Ruedy, Reto; ‘Pangaean climate during the Early Jurassic: GCM simulations and the sedimentary record of paleoclimate’; Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 104, pp. 543-559, 9 figs., 3 tables (May 1992)
• Flannery, Tim; The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People; ISBN 0730104222
• Kidder, David L. and Worsley, Thomas R.; ‘Causes and consequences of extreme Permo-Triassic warming to globally equable climate and relation to the Permo-Triassic extinction and recovery’; Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol. 203 (2004); pp. 207-237
• Hochman, Zvi; Gobbett, David L.; and Horan, Heidi; ‘Climate trends account for stalled wheat yields in Australia since 1990’; Global Change Biology (2017); published by CSIRO Agriculture and Food
• J. Liu, M. Song, Y. Hu and X. Ren; ‘Changes in the strength and width of the Hadley Circulation since 1871’; Climates of the Past; vol. 8 (2012); pp. 1169–1175
• McMahon, T.A. and Finlayson, B.L.; Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges. ISBN 3-923381-27-1
• Nugent, Daniel T.; Leonard, Steven W. J. and Clarke, Michael F.; ‘Interactions between the superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) and fire in south-eastern Australia’; Wildlife Research, vol. 41 (2014), pp. 203-211
• Orians, Gordon H. and Milewski, Antoni V. (2007). ‘Ecology of Australia: the effects of nutrient-poor soils and intense fires’ Biological Reviews, 82 (3): pp. 393–423
• Seidel, Dian J. Qiang Fu; Randel, William J. and Reichler, Thomas J.; ‘Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate’; Nature Geoscience, vol. 1 (January 2008), pp. 21-24

European toad versus cane toad: a study in contrasting research

Rivalled by only the rabbit and red fox as worst and most dangerous introduced species in Australia is the cane toad (Rhinella marina; historically and familiarly Bufo marinus).

Adult female cane toad with human hand for comparison

The toad is absolutely lethal to the unique marsupials of the genus Dasyurus (quolls) which have evolved for 150,000,000 years with zero exposure to toad toxins, and demonstrably cannot coexist with bufonids anywhere.  This is seen in the fact that toad invasion has throughout the monsoonal tropics caused 97 percent declines in Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) populations within a couple of years without any later recoveries. Bufonids also extremely dangerous to a number of predatory reptiles, such as goannas (Varanus) and elapid snakes, though unlike quolls these species can undergo behavioral or morphological changes to permit them to avoid eating toads.

Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus) – went from “Least Concern” to Endangered in a decade due to the spread of cane toads

It is well known that the cane toad was introduced into Australia to control a number of species of native “cane beetles” that were killing sugarcane by feeding on the plant’s sweet roots. It is also well known that, besides extirpating quolls and goannas, the cane toad did not reduce the numbers of cane beetles. In fact, the year 1946 saw the worst outbreak on record although toads had been released a decade beforehand!

However, it is almost unknown that at the very time the cane toad was released into Queensland, the CSIR was experimenting with the European Common Toad (then Bufo vulgaris; now Bufo bufo) as a pest control agent for Oncoptera grass grubs that were eating pastures in southern Australia. Proposals to import Bufo vulgaris (as I will call it for the rest of this post) and also the natterjack toad Bufo calamita date back to Western Australia in 1897. They were never executed in the first third of the twentieth century, but with increasing pest problems in the 1930s, the CSIR imported several specimens of Bufo vulgaris for a thorough test as a biological control agent against various Oncoptera. The CSIR found that Bufo vulgaris devoured all stages of Oncoptera (except, perhaps, the eggs) but that it could not dig down to reach them in their burrows. Consequently, the CSIR did not release Bufo vulgaris into southern Australia.

European common toad (Bufo vulgaris; now Bufo bufo)

If Bufo vulgaris (or the natterjack toad) had been released, it would have been likely more disastrous than the cane toad. This is because those few Australian species able to handle toad poison are almost all (Podargus frogmouths being a possible exception) immigrants from west of Wallacea – a group of islands with neither toads nor those predators (e.g. quolls) most affected by bufonid poison. Such species stand less likely to migrate into the Eyrean and Bassian faunal regions of central and southern Australia.

Eastern Quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) now extinct on the mainland due to cane toads, and “Endangered” even in toad-free Tasmania due to rapid anthropogenic climate change

Were either Bufo vulgaris or the natterjack released it is practically certain that the spotted-tailed quoll (Dasyurus maculatus) and eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus) would have been extirpated extremely quickly except – perhaps – from small islands where the toads might not have been released. Most likely those two species would have gone “Extinct” before the middle 1970s when the first studies of the cane toad’s impact on native fauna was published by Mick Archer and snake specialist Jeanette Covacevich. Even the Western Quoll (Dasyurus geoffroii) could quite possibly have been extirpated by toads before 1974 – although the drastic (87 percent around Perth) enhanced greenhouse gases decline in streamflow over southwestern Australia since then might ironically have protected it from introduced Bufo vulgaris. I have also imagined that poison in Bufo vulgaris eggs and/or tadpoles would have been a threat to the iconic platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) which hunts purely by touch and possesses as little exposure in its evolution to toad toxins as Dasyurus.

Spotted-tailed quoll Dasyurus maculatus – the largest Dasyurus. The CSIR’s prudence in not releasing Bufo vulgaris has so far saved this species from either extinction or being “Critically Endangered” and confined to small islands

In contrast to the CSIR’s serious study of Bufo vulgaris – although it quite naturally failed to test the toad’s toxicity toward those species probably saved thereby – Bufo marinus was released into Queensland with absolutely zero testing on the cane beetles it was supposed to control! Rather, the release of Bufo marinus was done as an act of faith that it would eat the beetles consuming sugar cane – a method used to sell toads to farmers and gardeners for several centuries before 1935.

Belief in the magical power of toads to control pests was dogma among the globe’s closely-knit sugar growing fraternity in the 1930s. It is highly plausible that this fraternity feared science for the same reason that large landowners in Catholic Europe did – that it would undermine their political power by providing justification for wealth redistribution from them. While the large landowners of Catholic Europe turned to stigmata stories and Marian apparitions as their means of countering class war, sugar planters held firmly onto beliefs about certain predators as effective pest control agents whether they worked or not. Thus, when the release of Bufo marinus in Puerto Rico coincided with reduced grub density and Raquel Dexter’s dissections showed Bufo marinus to eat beetles, it became dogma among the global sugar fraternity that toads would control beetles everywhere they be introduced. However, as demonstrated by Nigel Turvey in his Cane Toads: A Tale of Sugar, Politics and Flawed Science, the actual reason for the (temporary) decline in grubs in Puerto Rico was due to unusually wet rainy seasons pinching breeding by waterlogging soils.

The cost of this false belief to Australia’s unique native wildlife has been qualitatively different from other landmasses without native bufonids. Oceanic island predators – even when living on a landmass without toads – were chiefly predatory raptors that evolved on continents with toads. Thus, unlike quolls or Pseudechis snakes, other landmasses where Bufo marinus was introduced had predators who could effectively regulate its numbers – not to mention merely one-thousandth to one-hundredth the space to expand. Thus even with uniquely bad soils, uniquely low secondary productivity and uniquely unreliable runoff toads in Australia can reach higher densities than anywhere else in the world – further condemning those who introduced the cane toad based purely upon dogma.

Lessen for buying Pink Lady apples

Two Pink Lady apples bought at Woolworths mid-week. Notice how they are completely infected with a brown fungus, species not known to me or my family

Mummy and I have liked the fresh, crunchy flavour of Pink Lady apples for over a decade now, so much so that apart from occasional purchases by myself of Granny Smiths we rarely buy any other type.

This week, as we prepare for a lengthy holiday in Singapore, Japan, and with a not-yet-acquired visa Vietnam, I had a rude shock when I brought a few Pink Ladies to tide ourselves over in our last few days in Australia. I bought four Pink Ladies, and found the first to be so brown – infected with a fungus of a species I have not researched personally – that I dared not eat it. When I was in the local Woolworths buying the apples, they felt quite OK, and in the past buying fruit I have always tended to rely on feel since bad fruit is more often than not bad only inside.

However, when we discovered another completely infected and inedible apple on this last day in Australia, and when I first noticed the earlier bad one, my mother said that bad Pink Ladies can in fact be detected by means of their yellow colour in the core skin. One can faintly see a yellow colour in the core of the opened apple, and the one uninfected Pink Lady was green or red all over.

This really should be a lesson for all shoppers, as well as for Woolworths itself!

Proof Australia must pay – and remedy in the most rigid manner

Whilst I have known for some time how southwestern Australia and Central Chile have experienced severe declines in rainfall over the past forty-five years, an unseen revelation from scientists in California is much more conclusive proof of the impact of Australia’s dreadful (and deadly) pro-freeway transport policies. Although there does actually exist some doubt about the nature of changes in Califonia, there is no questioning in southwestern Australia and little in Chile that these changes are one hundred percent man-made.

What as been revealed according to Time Magazine (from a study in Geophysical Research Letters) is that the present drought in California, which has seen Los Angeles receive only 12.01 inches (305 millimetres) of rain between July 2012 and June 2014, is the worst as far back as paleoclimatic records go. The journal says that this does not only reflect the low rainfall but hot temperatures due to Australian-produced (indirectly as well as directly) greenhouse gas emissions. This is admitted even in a more recent study that suggests LA rainfall will remain the same in the future – in contrast to Santiago whose eight-year average rainfall of 224 millimetres (64 percent of the virgin mean) is the lowest on record, and more so Perth where only two wet seasons in the virgin period had less rainfall than the average since 2006.

The basic issue is that not only does Australia have the highest per capita emissions and some of the worst policies – when it has the resources and the need to have the very lowest emissions and cleanest policies were its mining lobby controllable – but that its incomparably abundant land and fossil fuels relative to population means that, as other nations improve their regulations of greenhouse pollution, there is every incentive for polluters to set up operations in Australia.

In contrast, if it was Australia that was forced to cut its greenhouse pollution back, the very source of emissions in China, India, Europe, Japan, Korea and the Americas would be literally destroyed. Without the large deposits of structural metals from the Australian Craton – or having to have these moved emissions-free as ores to nations with reliable hydropower – the industrial sector of Eurasia and the Americas would have to completely change policies. Most especially, as I have noted before, it would involve much longer-lasting products to use less cheap mineral resources from Australia. Of course this would hardly be acceptable to the fashionable sectors of Enriched World society, where as Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, the majority simply want to be different in a manner impossible if Australian raw material production was severely restricted. However, this severe restriction will do much more to save the Earth from catastrophe than all the regulations in Europe, East Asia, North America and the Southern Cone combined: by requiring frugality where nature demands it.

The impossibility of “efficient density”

The problem of the vast disparity in available land space versus population in Australia compared to the rest of the world is something seldom said but which I have emphasised – in case you are not familiar this site is the basic place to look to see how enormous a supply of land Australia has. Personal experience and reading has long made me suspicious that dense Enriched World neighbourhoods are in any way “liveable” – besides being unaffordable they are extremely crowded and noisy.

The claim that low-denity rural-style living as most Australians (although, most likely due to Enriched World farm subsidies, few actually farm) tends to reduce social interaction is one I have long been suspicious of both from personal experience and from reading books such as Arthur Brooks’ Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism — America’s Charity Divide, Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. Nonetheless, whilst I intuitively thought that social interaction in flat, sprawling Australian cities must be much greater than in constrained, mountainous, high-density Enriched World cities, I never had any clear evidence.

However, Jan Brückner and Ann Largey – in a very poorly-styled and badly-written article and focusing only on the United States – have clearly shown that, as I expected, low-density “Australian” cities have much greater social interaction than high-density “Enriched” cities. Their article ‘Social Interaction and Urban Sprawl’, although lacking the most basic elements of writing style like given results in the introduction (which it does not) or clear tables showing the expected results of how high density creates noise and fear (which is again absent) and taking numerous reads to merely understand results in the final table, shows clearly how limited the group involvement of high-density “Enriched”-style cities is, and that group involvement is strongly correlated with the presence of school-age children which cannot be affordably reared in crowded, noisy Enriched World cities. Moreover, Brückner and Largey confirm Brooks’ simultaneous findings about the extreme selfishness of welfare recipients – who are the least likely of all groups to engage in group activities or even non-religious clubs.

Brückner’s and Largey’s final note is that:

With a negative effect of density on interaction, individual space consumption would tend to be too low rather than too high, tending to make cities inefficiently compact, as explained in section 2.

This, indeed, may be why Australian cities do not sprawl to the extremely low densities (less than 100 people per km²) the land supply would permit, because:

“Thus, the empirical results suggest that social-interaction effects may counteract, rather than exacerbate, the well-recognized forces (such as unpriced traffic congestion) that cause cities to overexpand.”

This would imply strong social and family interactions in Australian cities that the Enriched World (and even more the Tropical) lack the land to achieve serve to limit sprawl. It is virtually certain, too, that these strong social ties create higher religiosity and combine therewith to greatly reduce ideological materialism and individualism in Australian suburbs and exurbs vis-à-vis their complete dominance in the Enriched and Tropical Worlds.

The problem facing the Enriched World is that, although individual space consumption is too low, the region has much too little flat land to increase space consumption to the levels actually or potentially possible in Australia under Abbott. Even in low-sediment regions where building on steep slopes is low-risk in terms of water quality and erosion, there is very little land relative to population compared to Australia’s three people per square kilometre. In most of Asia, southern and central Europe, and the western Americas, the situation is much worse again, as tectonically active mountains make “minimum lot sizes” advocated at the end of section 2 out of the question due to major potential erosion problems and higher value for species diversity.

These simple facts suggest that Brückner’s and Largey’s theory of a socially efficient density is impractical in the Enriched World – at all events once the discovery of the role of chalcophile elements as biological catalysts allowed the correction of their severe deficiency in the Australian environment and the discovery of current electricity permitted smelting the abundant lithophile elements enriched in the Australian environment. Christianity, especially in its most radical Anabaptist forms, certainly was very successful at countering the natural individualism and egalitarianism of European and American environments before these discoveries and thus limiting the demand for space.

Abundance of noise resulting from extreme scarcity of space in Enriched World cities undoubtedly makes it impossible to maintain the rituals of traditional Abrahamic and Dharmic religions (which require deep silence). Along with, as Brückner and Largey briefly note, alternative forms of “entertainment” or “ritual” to religion and family gatherings like:

1. political protests or activist movements
2. live music, cinema or theatre
3. live sport or games

tend to concentrate in the highest-density cities. They would also be more easily heard in a noisy environment with low sound attenuation, and history shows these alternatives have shaped the dense cities of the Enriched World as strongly atheistic and politically liberal. There is no political or practical possibility of this changing: in fact opinion polls suggest it is intensifying with the Millennial Generation and will further deplete the Enriched and Tropical World’s limited social capital.

Brückner and Largey – naturally – ignore the massive global pollution costs Australian suburbs impose, given that their greenhouse emissions per capita are four or more times higher than social-capital-depleted Enriched and Tropical World cities. If these costs were taken into account, Australian densities might rise if its suburbanites be willing to accept the large costs that must be paid, but as Melissa Sweet points out, that is almost impossible since the sacrifices in privacy and comfort of having by law to travel in crowded trains or buses is something history shows they will not accept – even without higher taxes on income and fuel to pay for it.

Why the Enriched World needs hunting reserves and not conservation parks

Calls for the abandonment of meat and acceptance of a vegetarian diet have come from ecologists and environmentalists for a very long time. The argument is that crops which feed one cow could feed fourteen people, and that if meat were abandoned then the amount of land needed to feed the human population would be dramatically reduced, as would the amount of water. The argument has been known to me for a long time but even in my much more naïve adolescent days I did not take it completely, in part because I was too unsure that real-world human history agreed with the notion that a vegetarian diet could work perfectly under most conditions.

My suspicion of these arguments, even as I witness major ecological catastrophes at my front door increasing severely with the East-West tollway (for which Australia ought to pay much more in global greenhouse costs than the cost of the road!) has grown with my knowledge of human history, most especially the poor nourishment of essentially vegetarian gatherers and farmers in the Tropical and Unenriched Worlds documented by every anthropologist you can name. The few potential exceptions come from soils (e.g. in Mexico) too rich in such elements as zinc, nitrogen iodine (and consequently some essential vitamins) to be viable comparisons with most early farming communities. These problems are seem most clearly in children, whose poor health can affect them for life.

Another thing (apart from my own enjoyment of and skill in cooking meat) that has shied me away from advocating vegetarianism is its unmentioned correlation with rigidly hierarchical societies, especially in Tropical Asia (see WALS Chapter 45) and also in the more nutrient-rich parts of Latin America. I have tended to see this rigid hierarchy – whether paradoxical or not – a cause of the inability of Monsoon Asia to avoid lowest-low fertility since industrialisation, because there becomes little opportunity for the lower classes to advance under the caste system of Hinduism or the rigid class system of feudal Japan, nor for adaptations to the radically different conditions of industrial society.

Thus, calls for modification of human diets like that of Time in ‘The Triple Whopper: Environmental Impact of Global Meat Production’ are something that, like the stories in Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex, I take with caution. Shifting to vegetarian or vegan diets may be practical and save much energy and water used in hot, arid regions which are naturally exceedingly low in protein – and where both religiously-based and practical vegetarianism is almost exclusively concentrated – but suspicion is not lost. In Australia, vegan diets are, even with fertilisers, less able to provide protein that they are on better soils, so that rigid veganism could produce even severer dietary deficiencies now than when only relatively rich soils could be farmed. Whilst Aborigines were very largely plant eaters (except on the north coast no more than 20 percent of calories were from animal foods) and there existed severe taboos against consumption of many animal foods to protect against their extinction, there were no customs for veganism in the pre-agricultural age even in this most nutrient-poor continent.

As I have outlined, developments in fertilisers and soil science have made the extremely rich soils of the Enriched World inherently uneconomic for agriculture due to high land prices from the competing demands of urban housing. The concentration of capital- and skill-intensive sectors in the Enriched World as it has less comparative disadvantage there than in primary sectors serves to further increase this comparative disadvantage: comparative disadvantage in primary production is proportional to the amount of capital a region possesses.

It is virtually certain, however, that the Enriched World cannot sustain forever the conflict between economic competition for skill-intensive industries on the one hand and intense class struggle on the other for very long – the end result we already see is a totally elitist Enriched World that offers jobs and housing only to the very rich, who desire a quality of life that leads to land and economic regulations that serve to make admittance require greater and greater skill.

The question is whether there is an alternative to either of two severe problems:

1. globally nutrient-deficient diets with associated social problems or
2. the virtual elimination of many ecosystems and the drying up of almost every dryland river system to make protein

which would result if food production were confined to the Unenriched and the less fertile parts of the Tropical World as the free market dictates? I am not tempted to believe that the Unenriched World and the flatter, nutritionally poorer parts of the Tropical World can ever produce by themselves the high-quality diet that has improved living standards in poor nations. It is simply improbable that in any industrialising nation there will not be demand for more nutritious diets, both because people can afford them more and because religious restraints thereupon inevitably weaken.

In my view, there is at least a partial answer, and it relates to the fact that the Enriched World’s high secondary productivity means a large proportion of most animal species can be killed each year without effect on populations. This is, as Frank Miniter notes in his The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting and which I can sympathise with (re the Enriched World) more than any other book in that now-defunct series, that strictly protected national parks and nature reserves in the Enriched World should give way to game reserves where hunting is permitted (possibly with some restraints). As Miniter points out, hunters actually pay the costs of conservation when other visitors generally do not, at least in reserves lacking entry fees, and these would be adequate for the limited conservation regulation needed in the Enriched World. Most critically, conversion of strict reserves to game reserves would allow the Enriched World to use its main natural resource – animal protein – more effectively on land unsuitable for farming and with less risk of overexploitation than its fisheries. It also may be more compatible with the “natural egalitarianism” of the Enriched World – seen clearly in the low incidence of cooperation amongst its native species – than trying to prop up agriculture that never evolved there. I do not believe there will be no problems – overhunting is not impossible and acceptance of different protein sources may be tough – but something more efficient and less costly for the Enriched World’s governments and the Unenriched World’s soils and water is urgently needed to prevent multiple disasters.

How chalcophile enrichment stopped industrialisation

A recent letter from Tim Low and Antoni Milewski presents an interesting picture of Chinese history:

“Hi Anthony (copied to Julien),

Part of our argument w.r.t. extinct Chinese parrots is that China has been disturbed profoundly by humans for far, far longer than the New World. I’ve known for years that the Chinese started using fossil fuels long before Europeans, but now I can put numbers to this. A recent study by John Dodson (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney) and co-authors (The Holocene, doi. org/rw8), investigating a site in northern China, have found evidence that the Chinese were using coal for fuel by 3500 years ago after deforesting the environment to the point of being forced to turn to coal instead. This refers to the Chinese Bronze Age. In fact, the sample at one site dated back much farther than that, to 4600 years ago! Admittedly the study area is unusual in that coal was lying around on the surface, and so mining of coal may have been unnecessary, but even so this shows how early the Chinese began to use fossil fuel – something the Europeans only began in the eighteenth century. However one looks at the fact, it’s clear that the Chinese were ahead of the rest of the world, in burning coal, by not hundreds of years but thousands of years.

All the best,

Antoni”

This story is something that is very surprising to me – although I knew of small-scale uses of coal for a very long time in the Enriched World.

China, like Western Europe, has substantial deposits of coal formed in the Carboniferous when its northwest – apart from the Tiān Shān – was a group of oceanic island arcs that became the Kazakhstan and Junggar Blocks, whilst the North China Craton was cool and humid to give large deposits of peat and muck to form coal that, in spite of intense deposition of sediments from the Tiān Shān and Himalayas, are close to the surface.

The question that begs one is that why China did not gain from using coal as Europe did. When Europe began burning coal, it was able to develop manganese metallurgy, which was the biggest breakthrough since iron was smelted, and which led to the industrial revolution. Europe was also able to develop current electricity, which produced the greatest breakthrough in human technology – lithophile metallurgy – which allowed the basic raw material of the continental crust to be used structurally for the first time and created the first industrial society.

There are two key possibilities:

1. that coal was burned in China before iron metallurgy developed, so that the Chinese never saw the potential in coal use
• this begs the question of why China would have lost coal technology in Zhōu times when iron was first smelted there
2. That China’s depletion in lithophile and even some siderophile elements slowed or halted technological development
• Modern China, however, does have large deposits of iron ore and manganese; however, these are concentrated in Inner Mongolia or South China away from where Chinese civilisation developed
• China does lack high-grade deposits of chrome ore, cobalt and nickel, key elements for the development of electrical generation and modern steels
• in fact, the absence of the use of cobalt and nickel by ancient Enriched World civilisations is a reflection of the concentration of their ores in infertile ophiolitic regions, since cobalt and nickel metallurgy is easier than iron
• In contrast, China – especially Tibet and surrounding areas – is exceptionally rich in rare chalcophile elements, having a high proportion of reserves of antimony, mercury and tin – all of which have exceptionally high enrichment factors.

This uniform enrichment in chalcophile elements undoubtedly delayed the Industrial Revolution a long way beyond iron metallurgy and the use of coal.

The techniques to extract ferrochrome, cobalt and nickel are the same as iron, so that once coal became available the technology for high-quality steels would already have existed. With cobalt available, magnetic properties needed to generate electricity would have been possible, but China – like Europe, North America and Spanish-speaking Latin America – is too young geologically to have major deposits of those reactive metals needed for an Industrial Revolution or possibly even for experiments with these metals.

Consequently, before the settlement of Australia, any Industrial Revolution would have been out of the question, even had technology with cobalt, nickel and manganese developed much further than it had in 1788.

On the flip side, would Australian settlements have survived and thrived as they have without lithophile metallurgy, or would they have declined beyond, say, the catastrophic 1914 drought??

The shrinkage problem for the Enriched World

This morning, there is an interesting article about an emerging and natural problem for an “industrial” Enriched World: that of urban shrinkage due to lowest-low fertility and/or large-scale out-migration.

These problems are inherent in a postindustrial Enriched World (at least practically) due to the combination of:

1. extreme comparative disadvantage in non-mobile resources (agriculture, mining, forestry)
2. limited flat land supply for maintaining replacement-level fertility
3. high taxes demanded by the working classes since their formation and eventually enforced on governments after World War II further reduce the money available to form families
4. inherent (at least in practice) large welfare states further reduce the incentives for women to have children

Despite this, there has generally been very little discussion of how the real Enriched (and Tropical) World will actually respond to urban shrinkage from lowest-low fertility or limited job opportunities.

In this context, although I was not able to read the full article, ‘How does(n’t) Urban Shrinkage get onto the Agenda? Experiences from Leipzig, Liverpool, Genoa and Bytom’ is a fascinating article to look at. It considers four European cities that in recent years have lost large proportions of their populations to these features and argues that policymakers do not take this into account.

However, I have not seen evidence of different attitudes by the real “policymakers” of the Enriched World – the working and welfare-recipient classes.

Urban shrinkage is no doubt easily accepted by locals who feel they can gain more space without losing the personal luxury items that are not obtainable in the more sparsely populated Australian suburbs where music listening and reading habits are comparatively exceedingly standardised.  The extremely materialistic character of welfare recipients will make them think population shrinkage is a good thing, because fewer people could theoretically spread the same wealth more widely.

However, each Enriched nation’s product of least comparative disadvantage does not remain such permanently. This is in severe contrast to Australia, Africa and Arabia where comparative advantage remains in the same specialisation – primary products – at all stages of development. It is difficult to see whether Enriched World governments will forever be able to cope with tax revenue loss from either departing industrial corporations or fewer working people. Personal luxury items which serve to define each individual in Enriched World cities are unlikely to provide the tax base people in these cities generally desire, and Enriched World politicians have enough dilemmas trying to maintain profitability and reduce debts without becoming vulnerable to an overthrow from the highly politicised – though outwardly peaceful – masses on which they depend. These masses fear that if regulations were dismantled and taxes reduced, they would lose job security, because secondary and especially tertiary industries are much more mobile than those sectors where Enriched World comparative disadvantage is greatest – agriculture and mining. This is made worse by their desire to spend so much on their favourite specialised consumer goods, rather than save for difficult periods.

Declining populations in many Enriched World cities have little hope to improve allocation of land, partly because the decline will mean more and more single-person households, but also because demand for high living standard will make people reluctant to ease development laws to permit more efficient use of land. In their book The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution, Barry Asmus and Wayne Grudem say:

“Just as environmental policies that are too lax [as in Australia and Africa today] allow for the careless destruction of the environment, so environmental policies that are too strict [as throughout Eurasia and the Americas today] prohibit wise use of the environment, as these restrictions also hinder economic growth”

These strict laws create problems for development of the large areas of steep land in Europe which surround cities built on tiny areas of flat land. If they were removed, it would be interesting to see if this steep land would be able to be used for anything other than recreation or wildlife habitat?? Most free-market urban planners (e.g. Wendell Cox) say nothing about whether urban housing can be built economically on slopes too steep to farm: if they can, there is, even allowing for erosion and other hazards, potential for dealing with the land shortage the Enriched World faces in a small way at least. Then, if the land shortage can be eased, so might lowest-low fertility, unaffordable welfare states, and a radically “selfist” culture – changes whose benefits I have noted before.