traffic fail

I drove to Marrickville yesterday, and on the way the traffic was frustrating, largely because Gardener’s Rd is reduced to one lane in each direction on weekends, when parking is allowed curbside. On the way back, though, the traffic on my side of the road was fine, but the traffic heading west was unbelievable. The queue to get through one intersection was well over a kilometre long. Not because of an accident, but because of the one lane limitation.

I looked at these people in their cars, took a conservative estimate, and figured the whole lot of them would probably fit in four to five buses. All of which could probably go through the intersection in one hit.

Okay, no, they’re not all going to the same places. (Although on second thoughts probably a substantial minority were headed for the M5). But you know what would help? If there was a bus route that ran from Kingsford or Maroubra, each fairly major centres in the East, to the inner West. Because there isn’t one. There’s a 370 that runs from Kensington through the backstreets of Alexandria to Newtown, which runs every half hour and ends at 8pm, and the 357 which goes through Kingsford on its way to Sydenham, but only runs ten buses a day between Monday and Friday. There’s just no buses attaching A to Z… and there are definitely no train lines, thanks to the abandoned eastern line.

It just… would have saved a lot of people a lot of time, and a lot of CO2 emissions, and a lot of money. If only people THOUGHT.

sydney transport fail

I was driving out to site the other day (recap: I’m an enviro scientist, I go out in the world and examine dirt and nasty chemicals for a living) and had a crazy thought. I realised I’d listened to every possible combination of pop songs at least once that week, and that not a single bookmarked station for my car was playing music. I paused. I shrugged. I flicked to AM radio.

It was possibly the best thing I have done since I started my job.

The very first segment I listened to was intelligent people discussing whether Sydney’s transport system, and the failure thereof, was actually detracting from the city’s useability as a business centre. They felt that it was, in that our terrible roads, nonexistent public transport, and interlocking road network insure that almost every day, there’s a single accident at one point in Sydney that manages to bugger the whole transport network up. So that day after day, successful business people jump in their cars, heading in early to work, and end up arriving at ten am. Wasted time, wasted hours, and business delays.

The problem with Sydney’s transport system… er, well, the META problem… is that essentially there are so many problems that no plan can conceivably fix them. Therefore, successive state governments propose plans to deal with our terrible transport system and particularly lousy public transport system, the plan budgets blow out, the plans never move past planning stage, and the whole thing gets canned. Again. Rinse and repeat for the next government.

Sydney hasn’t had a major public transport development in the last forty years. We’ve had bit solutions and we’ve actually retreated backwards, but there have been no major successful developments. This annoys me.

The other thing all of this leads to… well, essentially, Sydney transport has so many problems and so many plans to fix those problems, no one can keep track of those plans, and no one has a good opinion on them any more. We can’t weigh up the pros and cons of a new metro versus a western line because they’ve been separated in time and one has been canned anyway. We can’t argue for increasing bus services in the west over extending train lines because… well, largely because neither one will happen, but because the plans don’t coexist. They may not exist at all, I’m making this stuff up. We can’t pick one thing to support, firstly, because they’re all so bad, but also because we don’t KNOW what plans we’re talking about any more.

Which just leads to a more general crisis of knowledge. Where really… who the hell knows what the best option for Sydney is anymore? The radio presenters (702, if anyone cares) were saying they no longer know what they support, no idea if more roads, buses, trains, metros, tolls, congestion taxes were the answer. And when people who are paid to have opinions don’t have opinions, um, Houston, we have a problem.

For my money? Sydney could start by buying another four hundred buses tomorrow. They could deploy around half of them to the western suburbs, preferably express services. The transition to prepay, I support, it’s the first good idea anyone has had in ten years. On the other hand, while I do enjoy the metro 10 bus, I’m not convinced we really needed it on a bus route already served by eight other buses (although the extension to Balmain is lovely, or would be if anyone could be bothered to sit on that one bus for SO LONG). We should use the buses to go between different suburbs instead of in and out of the city.

Then, while we have buses moving people in the short term, we should be developing our train network. Yes, it will take ten or twenty years. That’s why we’re buying buses now. But the population of western Sydney is growing faster than most rabbits breed, and we’re eventually going to have to tie those into the wider Sydney train network. Not doing so simply ensures a snarl on every major motorway every day of the week, and insane amounts of greenhouse gases being pumped out while people sit and stare at their hands, or, worse, stickybeak at the latest accident on the road.

We should also start requiring that all new cars have electric batteries installed, and that cars should automatically shut off while idling in traffic or while stopped, but that’s a whole other argument I’m going to lose. Let’s stay with this one.

The new train network should certainly have express routes in and out of the city. But this will inevitably be a gendered transport system, and I’m not big on building sexism into infrastructure. We also need, again, routes going between different suburbs, and different train lines. Were it up to me, the Sydney train system would look like a regular spider web – central lines going to the centre from the periphery, certainly, but also support lines running between those lines. Rail loops that encompass more than four city stops. Beyond any other argument, they would take pressure off the central stops in the system; they’d also be far more woman and child friendly, given your average child and caretaker don’t need to go into the city at all – just between local suburbs.

Okay, yeah, we could also build roads from here til the end of the earth and bypasses from here to your kneecaps (ha, pun). But maybe once in a while, just for kicks, our solution to a given problem could actually, oh yeah, address the problem.

Deep in my heart, I’d like to feel that people care about their planet, acting sustainably, and ensuring that we leave our world with as much potential as we entered it. I’d like to believe that that’s what is driving the new move towards green products, sustainability, lower consumption, organics and fair trade.

On the other hand, if it’s because of the credit crunch, I can probably live with that too.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald today is giving awards to the top ten sustainable restaurants in Australia. The first six are in Sydney, the others are regional. The restaurants cited aren’t vegan or even vegetarian, they’re not niche, and they’re not in obscure locations or social ghettoes. In fact, I think I’ve been to one, without ever realising what it was. And the introduction to the article suggests that their sustainability is a result of the credit crunch.

However, the winning restaurant, Billy Kwong’s, has been tending towards sustainability for the last five years. That’s not an overnight credit crunch response, that’s a conviction – and judging by the article and its quotes, they’re pretty good at it. Sustainability isn’t about saving money for them, it’s about being good to the planet. Hell, in some cases it probably costs more, in a perfect instance of environmental costs not being factored into our society.

Still – whatever their reasons, I can’t help but feel any move towards sustainability is a good one. Consumption is down lately, largely because people are uncertain about the future. I still can’t see that as a bad thing. Yes, I worry about the economy, and I worry about the people we’re neglecting in society because of it. But lower consumption also means I can worry very slightly less about the environment, and really, in the long run… that probably means more.

For the record.

So I think you’ll remember that I talked about the black saturday bushfires in Australia. I may not have talked about it here, but at the time, I was involved in a number of conversations about how long term, heat waves kill far more Australians than any other natural hazard.

This was posted in the SMH today.

“… The most telling detail lost amid all that was written and broadcast about the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, which killed 173 people, was that more people died from heat stress in Melbourne than in the fires. During the oven-like temperature peak (three consecutive days above 43 degrees) Melbourne saw a spike of 1400 emergencies requiring an ambulance.

An extra 374 people died in Victoria that week compared to the average week. Most were heat stress related.”

From here

People die in fires. It’s horrible, it’s unbearable, it hurts. But a lot of people die in natural hazards, and a lot of them are simply unrecognised. And despite the above statistic, despite us knowing more people die from heatwaves than in any other hazard, they remain the most unstudied natural hazard in Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology doesn’t even have an Australia-wide recommendation for how to deal with them, and there are no accessible records of all the major heatwave events in Australia. The studies just aren’t there, and they need to be.

Also known as the graduate economy

Right, where was I?

Ah. To rehash: we have a global financial crisis hitting the many poor as well as the rich few, and our governments are responding to this by encouraging us to trash the environment by purchasing things we don’t need to improve the retail sector of our economy, and thus the whole. I find this ridiculous. Comfortable so far?

The next part of this whole theory that I want to question is this belief that we can boost the entire economy best by pumping funds into the retail section of that economy. Frankly, I don’t buy it, and I don’t think it’s the best use our money could be put to. Think about it. Retail and sales are among the lowest paid sectors in our society. They’re not progressive, they don’t help developed higher level skills, and they rarely allow people to transfer to other areas. If we try to boost our economy by developing the retail area, all we’re really doing is restricting ourselves to maintaining a service based economy. Certainly that’s better than remaining in an industry or agriculturally based society, but it is also a good step down from a skills based economy. And, as above, it is bad for the environment, and I don’t hold truck with that kind of thing.

A further problem. If we develop our retail sector, then that’s going to be the primary area people are looking for new jobs – even individuals who have higher skills but are somehow restricted from using them. Cases in point – recent migrants, or, if you care little about those, young graduates – people who have just come out of uni with big debts, high levels of education, and no experience. Take it from me, in this economy, their hopes of getting decent jobs in their chosen fields are pretty poor. No one wants to take a risk on an unknown quantity, and the fact remains that no matter how well a graduate performed in uni, they don’t have real world experience. And these kids need jobs, so when opportunities become available in sales and retail, they take them.

That seems to me like an awful waste of skills and education. But it’s also likely to be the way that things remain until there is some kind of incentive for those kids to get hired into higher paying, more skills based, more progressively geared jobs. Short term, they’re all going to stay in poorly paying, commissioned jobs for the sake of the experience, and hope like hell they can move elsewhere once this whole depression moves on. In the meantime, more jobs are based in the retail and sales sector, and so we need to prop it up even more to ensure that the economy doesn’t collapse. Whoop-de-doo. I have another idea.

In France, the government deals with high unemployment by determining that any role which requires an individual to work more than a specified number of hours per week will be split into two roles, thus hiring twice as many people, and preventing individuals killing themselves with work. I think this is perhaps the best idea I’ve ever seen. Think it through: if more people are hired into senior roles – which they’d have to be, since people in the senior roles are also the ones most likely to be working stupid long hours – then people necessarily progress up the corporate ladder faster. No one has to wait endless years in a role for which they’re dramatically overqualified until a position one stop above them becomes available for them to be promoted into – as frequently happens in Australian government service, at NGOs and not for profits, and probably the corporate sector, too. And if people progress more quickly up the ladder, more spaces become available at the bottom – which means people with new qualifications can move in more easily, because more staff are actually needed. People can actually apply their qualifications instead of cooling their heels for years until positions they want become available, and no one needs to become ridiculously overqualified to get a simple entry level job. Oh, and no one needs to spend years in a retail or sales role to make ends meet, which means we also don’t get stuck with our economy tied to the retail sector ever more tightly. We can move away from service into skills.

Here’s the thing, you see. I am quite sure that a lot of people are capable of a lot more than they’re given credit for. Graduates, certainly – I’m among them, and I know I could do more than I’m being offered – but also people part- and most of- the way up the ladder. Almost everyone is capable of moving up, doing more, having greater responsibilities and achieving more, but there are very few opportunities available to do so. If you required job sharing for any role that requires more than 35 hours per week, though, suddenly roles become available everywhere, and at all levels of experience.

I realise this may look like a recipe for disaster, too. After all, more employees means more pay that owners need to dish out, right? Maybe not. I’m pretty sure that the reason a lot of high tier workers get paid a lot is because they spend endless hours in their offices, because no one else can complete their jobs. If we get more people in to do those same roles, everyone is there for less time, and can develop their expertise simultaneously. No one has individual, crucial skills – roles are shared and so is knowledge. Individuals can be paid less, and be allowed more, say, vacation time – because there are other people who can take over their roles. Also, CEOs and directors could go home before seven once in a while – and although I think it would take them time to adjust, in the end? They’d be better people for it.

That, and studies show that people who spend longer hours at work are usually less healthy than those in lower positions with shorter hours and more down time, even with the money to smooth their paths. This just in, folks; the money actually isn’t worth it.

I just think… we’re wasting our skills, we’re wasting our youth, we’re wasting our education, economy and environment. And we’re responding to it by spending more money in the least productive areas of our economy. We need to move away from that, and we need to move away from a mindset where consumerism is equivalent to patriotism. It’s dangerous, and it’s short sighted. And meanwhile, people who really want to help save the world are giving people change or hassling people to buy more things. I can’t honestly see that helping anything.

I think I can fix that!

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the economy vis-a-vis the environment lately. I think the last time I posted, I was talking primarily about how the way governments of the world are responding to the economic crisis by handing out money and telling people to go buy stuff. This drives the retail economy, which keeps people employed, and keeps suppliers employed, and has people purchasing things in and out of the economy and yada yada, economic movement leads to growth. Basically what all of this looks like is that by buying things, we are boosting the economy, creating jobs, and preventing the crisis from becoming worse.

I guess I see the logic in that. It’s just a pity that the first message our government came up with in times of trouble is “buy things you don’t need to maintain the status quo”.

Don’t get me wrong. I dislike the collapsing economy as much as anyone. Probably more, because I’m an idealist and dislike the way that greedy banks and companies have overloaded on debt, undergone hugely risky investments, and should be allowed to collapse but can’t be because of what it will do to everyone else in the world. They made risky investments, they took bad bets, and now they should fall. That’s the way it works, and government bailouts simply make the banks think they can do all these things again – so they don’t get better, don’t cut costs, don’t have a reason to develop better hiring practice. This is an unregulated economy we live in and they wanted it that way – right up til the point where they lost the game and started screaming for government money. By bailing them out we encourage bad behaviour – but we have to bail them out, or the whole world gets into trouble.

I’m not overstating that, either. If banks in the states collapse, it does have worldwide repercussions. Not just the people at the bank who lose their jobs, or the people with money in those banks. Do you know that a collapsing bank in New York can affect a Kenyan villager? And frequently does? It’s an easy assumption that collapsing markets in the first world won’t really affect things in the second and third world, but it isn’t true. You may not be aware, but one of the greatest money flows in the world is that of remittances – money that migrating individuals send home to their families. I can’t find my source at the moment (messy room, give me time), but up to five percent of some countries GDPs are made up by remittances. FIVE PERCENT. It’s huge.

But those remittances rely on migrants being in work, and being able to send money home – and a lot of them are losing work, while costs here are rising, and they can’t become re-employed. They can’t afford to send money home – and in a lot of cases, if they’re unemployed, they risk being deported. Which always looks good on a resume. So either they illegally overstay their visas or start working illegally, which becomes the same thing. If only the financial crisis DID only affect the wealthy.

So yes. We need to maintain our economy. We need to re-establish growth. We need to create jobs and development and keep people in work and all help out together.

Do we really have to do it with meaningless consumption and pointless waste? I don’t think so. There has to be another way.

I have a theory, I have a thought. I think I know how to fix this.

But I’m not going to tell you right now, because my wrist is hurting and I missed lunch. Come back on Monday.

There’s no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. *clicks heels*

i want to talk for a little while about refugees. And more specifically, asylum seekers.

Australia talks a fair bit about asylum seekers these days. Mostly about illegal asylum seekers, queue jumpers, undeserving boat people. There’s virtually no connection made in the media between asylum seekers and refugees, about how one is only there because they’re applying to be the other. In fact, the way the media talks about it most days, asylum seekers are only on boats on their way to Australia to sneak into the local population and work illegally, or possibly become terrorists and a threats to Australians on Our Own Soil. Asylum seekers = bad, visa’d migrants = good. Although maybe less good now that the global financial crisis (codenamed GFC by my ever lovely sister) is leading to higher unemployment.

Let’s talk some facts though, shall we? Asylum seeking is a right under international law, and there is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. If we want to talk about people who arrive in Australia and seek asylum, ‘irregular’ migrants is the proper term. And asylum seekers are rarely coming to Australia, or anywhere, because they’ve heard we have great conditions or a decent job market or easier visa criteria for entry. They’re coming because they’re desperate. Desperate in ways most people will never understand and never have criteria to compare for.

Asylum seekers aren’t criminals, mostly, and seeking asylum doesn’t make them criminals (see above). What asylum seekers are, largely, are refugees who haven’t been awarded the status yet, or won’t be awarded the status because the definition of a refugee comes out of the post world war two period and requires the persecution of the individual by the state or another body. Persecution is the key to refugee status. If you aren’t persecuted, you aren’t technically a refugee – even if you’ve lost your family, friends, home, money, job and maybe country. If someone isn’t doing it specifically to you, you’re not a refugee. But that’s another argument we’ll have another time. In short, an asylum seeker is someone coming to a country who seeks to be classified as a refugee.

And we respond by resenting them, dispatching them to outer islands for processing, holding them in the desert for years on end while their papers are processed, i.e. stashed in drawers in leaky basements, asking repetitive invasive and personal questions to determine their status, and attempting to keep them from joining our societies – lest we lose too many of our privileges.

Nice.

You know the alternative to seeking asylum around the world, if you’re stateless, persecuted and unable to find other help? Refugee camps around the world. International protection. If you can call it that, when thousands on thousands of people live in spaces for a couple hundred for years on end and are fed starvation rations by the UN and aid groups who can’t afford to help them any better. When people live in what are basically badly built tents and crime is rampant and rape is pandemic to the extent that the Refugee Research Centre investigates camps where every single woman in the camp has been raped, usually several times. Where families are ripped apart by the fact that fathers and husbands can’t protect their women and are destroyed by shame while women and children are trafficked, diseased, and murdered, and their menfolk are beaten within an inch of their lives for fighting back. Where crime rings can corrupt the running organisation and steal the food and sell the children.

I had a woman from the Refugee Research Centre come talk to me a couple weeks back. In her words, there are no good refugee camps. None. There are just camps in varying stages of bad and awful.

So. That’s the alternative for many asylum seekers. That’s where some of them come from. And don’t think I’m exaggerating. Do you honestly believe anyone becomes an asylum seeker, comes maybe thousands of kilometers on boats and overland with little money and no prospects and bribes pirates and smugglers, if they have a whole armload of choices about what they could be doing back home? I wouldn’t bet my pink teddy bear. No one becomes an asylum seeker who doesn’t bloody well need to.

And then of course they come here and we detain them for years on years. Ever hear of Woomera? It was a detainee camp in the desert, meant for 800, with around 4000 people living in it. Literally, in the middle of the desert, where people were kept for months or years, with no information about their visa applications or progress. Hours drive from their legal representation, so that time that could be spent on paperwork – the commonwealth owes certain amounts of legal rights and services to asylum seekers – was instead spent on the commute. I’m willing to bet that pushed down the chances of some asylum seekers, wouldn’t you? And we do this to people who have already suffered persecution in their own countries to the extent that they have left behind everything they’ve ever known.

There is no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. Please try to keep that in mind.

How much money do I have to spend to save the planet?

One of the most talked about topics everywhere in the world at the moment appears to be the global financial crisis. And in conjunction with that, the stimulus packages most governments are preparing in order to save our economies. The message of the moment seems to be “Go out and buy!”, or be unpatriotic. Don’t you care the unemployment is five percent and rising?

I do care. I tried to find a job in this market, and I have to tell you, it was in no way easy. I did end up with a job, and by pure luck, it’s a job I much prefer to any of the many others I tried applying for. I’m now a research assistant with an environmental research unit, and seriously, that suits me a lot better than working in consultancy ever would have. I think I had some brain death moment where I thought being grown up was having a corporate job and doing 8- 5 days, making obscene money and stressing myself into the ground. Heh. If that’s grown up, I think I’d rather stay a hippy.

Anyway, I do care about the economy. But I am concerned that the immediate response of the governments to slowed growth was “Go!!! Buy stuff! Buy stuff you DON’T NEED!”. Sustainable it is not. Pointless it is. Counterproductive… well, we’ll see about that one.

There’s a definition of environmental sustainability that includes the economic impact of environmental choices we make. Essentially, a system that is environmentally sustainable but not economically sustainable, or economically sustainable but not environmentally sustainable, is in reality neither. To be a successful sustainable system, one has to be both environmentally and economically sound, or one world or another is going to melt down. Probably both, because that’s the way it goes.

So this thing where y0u go out and buy crap to save the world, I’m not so comfortable with. And, in the interests of full disclosure, I am not innocent of the crime. I bought myself a new pair of sneakers, despite the fact I have not actually received my stimulus payment yet. They cost an obscene amount of money and I feel guilty about it, and I’m trying to think of ways to spend the rest of my money to fix things.

(Let’s note, the last pair of sneakers I owned were more than five years old, had been worn to the point of unwearability twice and saved by the washing machine and cautious care, and were finally relegated to the back of my cupboard after a field trip in which they were once more trashed. I still feel bad.)

Anyway, when the stimulus package was announced, the first thing I thought of was to give some money to a charity. Because, if you didn’t know, most charities are in a lot of trouble at the moment because their corporate sponsorship is being cut back as companies cut costs. This despite the fact that probably more people need those charities now; that doesn’t really seem to factor into their calculations. Anyway, a charitable donation sounds like a great way to use some of the money, AND it will be tax deductable, so really it’s like I get the money twice. VERY COOL. In any case, I will be donating around a hundred dollars of my stimulus package to the NSW RSPCA. I’m also buying a baseball cap. Because hard times aren’t just hard for people, and one of the largest animal shelters in Australia is under threat because of lack of funding from the government at the moment. Please, won’t you think of the puppies?

The other thing I thought of today to use my money in environmentally friendly ways is to invest in my backyard garden. This! This is brilliant! This will save me money in the future on groceries, save carbon miles in food, and give me some exercise. Also, I just love looking at my backyard plants. They make me so very happy. This last year I have had tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, capsicum and zucchini growing in my backyard, as well as quite a complement of herbs – basil, mint, lemongrass, thyme, rosemary, parsley and chives, from memory. Oh, and we have a dwarf lemon tree, so I have quite a bit growing that is entirely environmentally friendly. It’s all fed off bore water, so it’s not sucking up town water resources, and it can have a lot more water, too.

At the moment, I’m scoping the internet for garden resources. I’m not coming up with much that’s handy, but I have found what I think is a very cool looking group: Kendall Farms. They grow dwarf varieties of all sorts of fruit trees, many of which I have never seen before. And dwarf trees are great – they take up lots less space, they need a lot less water, and they still provide you with as much fruit as you can use. Take it from someone who had a full size lemon tree and gave away two kilo bags of lemons at certain times of year – you can grow too much fruit.

But Kendall Farms? They’re growing dwarf avocadoes, persimmons, blueberries. Heaps of things. They don’t seem to be selling things off their website, which is a great shame, but I absolutely intend to go find one of their retailers or someone similar in the very near future. I mean, think how expensive blueberries are – and you’re usually doing well if they’re only been brought in from the next state. They’re super good for you, but their carbon miles are hideous! So I totally want a dwarf tree. It will be small! It will not need lots of care, and it will provide me with environmentally friendly fruit.

Oh, and yes, mister government man. I will be spending some money to save the economy. If only you’d pat me on the back for trying to be environmentally friendly while I’m at it.

Carbon footprints: the kind you shouldn’t leave in national parks

A friend recently asked me to blog about environmentalism, or more specifically, carbon footprints. Environmentalism I can do; carbon footprints aren’t something I specialise in. But I understand the basics, and I understand why they’re a good idea.

Simply put, a carbon footprint is the amount of Earth – land, soil, biological environment, atmosphere – it would take to reabsorb a particular carbon dioxide output. More generally, there are environmental footprints, and honestly I think they’re more helpful – they indicate more precisely just how much of the planet we overuse. Carbon footprints look at only one aspect of that, and I think it’s a pity. Still, when it comes to giving an indication of how much natural capital you’re using up, and I think that’s always a good thing.

The term carbon footprint is also used more generally, to indicate how much carbon you individually are putting out and are responsible for. Most websites offering carbon neutralisation are looking at it this way – telling you how many trees you need to plant or how much money to invest in sustainable energy to make negligible your impact on the world. This is a nice idea; I think it encourages people to tread more lightly on the earth, and it’s in the tradition of intergenerational equity, which is just a great principle. It says that we shouldn’t change anything on the planet, that we shouldn’t be interfering with the overall balance, that we should let it be.

Well, sort of. It can also offer easy justification to overconsumption and pollution. Doesn’t matter if we’re emitting sulfur dioxide over here – we’ll just clean up some air over there. It’s much like some Australian environmental legislation that states wetlands can be bulldozed or built upon if similar wetlands are reconstructed elsewhere. Besides being just a really strange idea, there’s a bit of playing God going on here – which I have no issue with on a sacrilege type basis, it’s more about the fact that we’re just not very good at it. We’re not much good at replacing things we bollocks up, we just end up wit two bollocksed versions of the original, which seems to me an extreme exercise in irony. For neutralising carbon footprints, it’s a bit more straightforward, but there’s still some of that going on. I for one would really just prefer that everyone lowered their consumption to begin with; I think that would be great. I also think that that’s unlikely, and I for one blame capitalism. At least there’s one thing to be grateful for with the economic crisis – our carbon emissions have dropped, since no one wants to start new projects.

Anyway, carbon footprints make for a useful indicator of what’s actually going on with our emissions. It’s something people can visualise, whether they’re from a scientific background or not; it gives the uninitiated something concrete to work with.  Carbon footprints are an easy concept to work with, and they’re convertable – you can work out the carbon footprint of an individual or a country; it can all be quite easily calculated.

And because of that, they’re a good basis to set targets for emissions reduction. At present, the carbon footprint of the word is far in excess of the size of the world – if everyone consumed like Americans, we’d need something like 25 worlds to recover from it. If everyone lived like Germans and the French, we’d need five or six, if we lived like most Chinese or Indians, we’d need less than one. Now there’s an argument for lowered consumption – or, on the other hand, lower populations. I’m pretty well convinced that population control is going to be essential in the future towards the survival of civilization as we know it, so I hope we can all get over our preconception about choice and the importance of the genetic heritage of a child in a hurry. There is a LOT to be said for adoption. Nature vs nurture has been pretty well solved, and the people who raise a kid will have a lot of influence on how they turn out. Hell, if you care about raising good children, don’t have your own – be a teacher. You’ll do more for the world.

Which gets away from the topic! A lot of countries have refused to commit to carbon emission targets based on carbon footprint measurements. Most notably the USA, who seem to think it’s fuzzy science and fuzzy thinking. I realise it can seem that way, but it’s all based on a system of scientific measurements of Co2 output – the footprint bit is really just a convenient bit of marketing, a nice way of presenting things to the public. And it’s as good a tool as any we have for changing public conceptions and government ideology into the future.

In conclusion – you should all reduce your carbon footprint as muc as you can day to day. Unplug things not in use, turn off lights, go read a book outside instead of watching tv. Don’t eat stupid quantities of food and then run on an electric treadmill (this one really bugs me). Reduce, reuse, recycle, buy your electricity from a sustainable source if you can, and just dowhat you can to lower car usage and food miles – which I shall talk to you about soon.  Take the bus, go for a walk, grow some veggies. But if you’re struggling and decide to buy some carbon credits instead, I promise I will forgive you.

Why those darn environmentalists aren’t to blame.

Australia is currently undergoing one of the worst peacetime disasters it has ever suffered. Hundreds of people are dead, nearly two thousand houses have been razed, livestock are dead in obscene quantities, thousands of hectares of native and agricultural land have been burnt out. It’s obscene down there, like something out of your nightmares, and many of the stories coming off the radio aren’t even being published because they’re too horrific to put into words. Unsurprisingly, people are looking for someone to blame.

Cue the “Blame the environmentalists” gang, led by their mighty leader Miranda Devine. (There was also “blame Victoria for allowing abortions” but I think we can all see the missing links in that logic, no?)

The argument here is simple. Bushfires begin when there’s excessive amounts of natural debris on the ground. If the deadfall – ‘mast’ is a technical term – remains on the floor, it is there for to major bushfires to feed on. The more mast there is, the bigger the fire becomes. Therefore, by preventing the burning off of mast and clearing bushland, environmentalists are responsible for bushfires and the deaths this week. Germaine Greer also got in on  the action and called the authorities arsonists for not having a strong hazard reduction program, which really helped everyone involved.

Okay from a certain point of view, I get it that this makes sense. Controlled fires are less damaging than bushfires, so have small fires often and prevent big ones through burning off the fuel they’d use. Sounds great. Go to.

It doesn’t work that way.

I have a book right here from a guy called Keith Smith who’s explaining that South Eastern Australian is the most dangerous fire zone in the entire world. That sclerophyll forests can accumulate leaf litter at a rate of seven tons per ha per year. That eucalypts, the most common genus in Australia, contain volatile oils in their leaves that can spontaneously burst into fireballs when the ambient fire temperature is around 2000 degrees C.

Here’s a few other facts I don’t have the literature to back up. Ninety percent of all serious fires in Australia are started by humans. Probably half of those are started when control fires burn out of control. A controlled fire has an energy output of around 5000 watts/metre square; that’s as hot as it can get before firefighters can no longer safely put it out. It burns off leaf litter and tree canopies and surface layers of bark and smaller trees.

A seriously out of control bushfires has an energy output of around 60 000 w/m square. It burns everything in its path. Large, old trees can survive it; smaller ones fry, leaves are gone, grass burns, branches burn, houses burn. In the fires on the weekend, the metal alloy in car wheels melted onto the ground. Sand was turned into glass. They think it was as hot as Dresden when it was bombed; that’s the kind of force you’re talking about with a real fire. They’re so hot they generate their own thermal winds and can outrace people on foot, sometimes even cars. If you’re within 140 metres of a real fire in the open, you’re probably going to die from the heat even before the smoke inalation gets you and hopefully a long time before the flames get there.

A bushfire is a natural catastrophe. It’s a force of nature, not some piddly little campfire. And hazard reduction does less than nothing to stop it. If the wind changes, a bushfire can turn around and ravage straight back across the land it just burnt; a wall of flame with spot fires racing ahead. You can never burn something so far down that a bushfire won’t find something to burn, and a controlled fire just doesn’t have the heat, strength, speed or energy to burn out the kind of a fuel that a massive fire counts upon. A controlled fire burns off outer bark; the fires on the weekend had trees exploding ahead of the fire. In the 2001 fires, hazard reduction burns were conducted; as soon as the winds changed, the bushfires went straight over the land so recently burned. If you get a really big bushfire, it just doesn’t matter. It will burn something.

Control fires don’t control major bushfires. They might slow the spread of smaller ones, but the smaller ones are controllable anyway. Also, they’re an active danger to the Australian  landscape. Many Australian plants rely on fire to open their seed pods, on around a seven year cycle. To be effective, control fires should really go through every year; and they’re not hot enough to open the seed pods. Also, by going through so often, they eliminate plants that can take five years or more to mature enough to seed – they limit diversity and threaten both long- and short-lived plants.

Alright – maybe you think diversity doesn’t matter poop when people are dying, and I can certainly understand that. How about this, around half of major bushfires in Australia occur when control fires get out of control. The very hazard reduction tools become the threat itself. How do you justify it then?

The facts are these: Australia is a bushfire country, and because of accidents of climate, the south eastern corner is in the most danger. People choose to live in rural areas and don’t always understand the risks they’re taking. It’s easy to say that people are dying and therefore something is wrong, but it’s not always the case. When people build in flood zones, they get flooded; if they build on sand dunes, their house foundations are eroded away; in New Zealand, if you build in Wellington, maybe you’re going to lose your house in an earthquake one day. That’s just the risk you take. We live in the natural world; we don’t control it, nor can we. Claiming we should have control over bushfires and have saved everyone by preventing them just isn’t realistic.

That isn’t to say that we can’t do better. We can. We need a better warning system in place, and when fires are bad, people need to be compelled to leave their homes. At the moment, people are given a choice between staying to defend their properties and getting out early: in bushfires like the one we just had, that choice has to go. No one can survive by anything except pure luck, so everyone has to get out. We need better indicators of how bad fires are and better ways of communicating to people what to do. And probably, we need better standards about how and where people build their houses, with what materials.

The reality is that we can’t stop bushfires. So we have to learn to live with them.