It’s time I confessed! I drive a 4WD and I love taking it on long trips to the outback. I was even a petrol-head in my younger days. And I’m quite partial to the occasional overseas holiday. Oh, and I like eating meat as well.
Some may think it’s shocking that a sustainability advocate would do such things. But I enjoy my lifestyle and I’d like to help ensure that such lifestyle choices are available to future generations.
The extent of my impact on the planet’s resources can be estimated in terms of the area of productive cropland and pasture required to grow food, seas that support fisheries and forests to provide timber and absorb carbon dioxide generated through my energy use. The area required is called a person’s ecological footprint.
A rough calculation of a person’s ecological footprint is provided by the website www.myfootprint.org. It says that my footprint is about 6 hectares, a bit below the Australian average of 7.6 hectares.
But there are only about 12 billion biologically productive hectares in the whole world and so if everyone lived like me then the planet could only support about 2 billion people on an ongoing basis. If all of the world’s 6.5 billion people lived like Australians, we would need at least 4 earths.
And it’s getting worse. In the time it will take you to read this article the world’s population will increase by about 500 or about 80 million in a full year. An increased population must mean fewer resources per person. Technology can help increase the productivity of those resources but for most of human history we’ve used technology to increase our use of resources.
Surely sparely populated Australia is immune to such considerations. But early last century Australia’s foremost geographer, Griffith Taylor, calculated a carrying capacity for Australia of about 20 million based on our limited fertile soils and unpredictable rainfall. Many current experts think his estimate was pretty accurate.
Yet we have crazy policies such as the baby bonus to encourage population growth on the flimsy pretext of addressing the problem of an ageing population. We’re almost at 21 million (2007, will pass 23 milion in 2013, see ABS) and growing by 240,000 each year.
The high growth states of Queensland and population growth hotspots such as Hervey Bay could play a significant part in stabilising Australia’s population.
Those who argue for continued population growth in the pursuit of short term economic prosperity fail to understand that more people ultimately means reduced affluence for future generations.
This was originally published in the Fraser Coast Chronicle on 10 April 2007.
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