The other day, Dick Smith (a retired Australian businessman), launched an advertisement asking “why don’t you link the Murray Darling crisis to record population growth?”
Now it is true that infinite population growth is not sustainable in any situation, so population growth is a problem. However it is not what has caused the Murray Darling issue NOW. Current population figures do not necessitate pumping the river dry for cotton, or for other large scale agri-businesses. Partly because the cotton and food is largely grown for export: we don’t even process the cotton into goods for sale overseas. It is pretty much independent of the current population size in Australia.
Talking of population is, in this case, an avoidance of the real ‘elephant in the room’ – business – and the idea that business must always grow. If business must always grow then, in the current situation, it will always attempt to consume more water, more raw materials, and extract as much as it can from the land. This is irrespective of population growth. And these actions become particularly bad when the government thinks its main priority is increase the profit of big business, and to increase the consumption or extraction of limited natural resources by such businesses (to keep them going). And that thinking and action is well documented. The Right in particular govern for business profit alone.
Population growth may add to the pressures, but it does so in an environment which makes development, and high profit for some, more important than water conservation or conservation of land for food production and wildlife.
This is the ideology of neoliberalism. Profit and growth of profit is the only thing that counts.
Maybe we do need to slow population growth, but don’t pretend that will solve problems generated by business and compliant government.
Tags: 'nature', Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, economics
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