First published by WILDLIFE Australia magazine in its Spring 2014 edition, and has been republished here with full permission .
Here’s a line in the sand: If we can’t save the Great Barrier Reef, what can be saved?
The current national and international showdown over the Reef has significance well beyond its own immense values as a world heritage area. It serves as an ultimate proof point of people-driven sustainability challenges everywhere, the mighty carbon economy pitted against one of nature’s best.
Integration is one of the dominating themes of the 21st century – mobile phones that incorporate the functions of a dozen devices, dizzyingly rapid movement of goods and people everywhere, and inspiring global social movements – but we’ve been markedly unsuccessful in the most important integration of all: that between economic, social and environmental goals for sustainability. And current governments seem to be ditching any ambition to achieve integration, in favour of all-out fossil fuel exploitation.
T he Reef is where modern environmentalism down under-style took off in the 1960s, with an uplifting national campaign to ban mining and oil drilling that resulted in protection meant to last forever. But half a century later, the battle to save the Reef is on again.
It’s as if some cosmic joker has orchestrated it by juxtaposing one of the seven natural wonders of the world with a treasure trove of fossil fuels – vast reserves of coal, coal seam gas and oil-bearing shale beds – in one of the world’s per-capita wealthiest and ecologically richest nations, conveniently close to the resource-ravenous Asia-Pacific economic growth zone.
Assuming that we discount intelligent design and opt for sheer geological happenstance, it nonetheless is serving as a profound ‘apple in the Garden of Eden’ test for Australian governments. Can they resist the addictive, sugary allure of short-term economic gains for the long-term intangible of sustainability? Will they accept that you can’t always have your cake (or apple) and eat it too?
Rationally speaking, our governments can’t just keep on approving every mine, drill site, port, ore loader and shipping route with ‘a set of environmental conditions’ and expect the Reef and its appreciators to cop it sweet. Faith in the process of environmental impact statements has diminished if not entirely evaporated. They are often wrong and rarely consider the cumulative impacts of multiple developments.
If you read between the lines of UNESCO World Heritage Committee reports, it is fairly likely that the Reef will be declared ‘World Heritage in Danger’ in 2015. Such a listing is very rare for first world nations, particularly those with a stable democratic government and strong economy. It usually applies to global troublespots, such as war-torn Syria and the Congo.
One exception, paralleling the Reef in terms of its huge tourism significance, was Yellowstone National Park in the US, listed in danger in 1995 and more happily de-listed in 2003. The Australian government is on a course that openly sets it against the natural environment and confirms it as slavishly pro- economic development across a range of global forums, many converging around the contest between coral and carbon.
The G20 will meet in Brisbane in November, and Australia wants to keep climate change off the agenda. Australia’s approach to a series of bilateral so-called free trade agreements and the multi-lateral Trans Pacific Partnership bodes poorly for the environment. Australian participation in the annual UN climate negotiations, seeking a post-2020 successor to the Kyoto Protocol in Paris next year, is in disarray. And provocation underpins Australia’s approach to world heritage, with the Reef’s woes, the dire precedent of seeking to withdraw a 74,000 hectare swathe of Tasmanian forests from world heritage protection (fortunately rejected), and the proposed expansion of uranium mining at Ranger inside the Kakadu world heritage area.
All of this holds clear potential to wreak havoc for the world heritage cause internationally, and for sustainability more widely. If the message from affluent Australia is that diminishing care is the new norm, with economic growth always trumping heritage protection, what can we expect from war-ravaged Syria, or developing India, or any number of less privileged nations in Africa and elsewhere that struggle desperately to preside over their world-class sites?
If an economically privileged nation like Australia won’t take decisive action to preserve a much loved and globally renowned ecosystem, then how can we expect impoverished, strife-ridden or otherwise struggling countries to take a stand for their world heritage areas?
Australia has previously had a reputation as a constructively engaged ‘good faith’ player in international environmental forums. That reputation is increasingly in tatters. Perhaps, given the intent to keep extracting and exporting our fossil fuel and mineral resources, it is more honest and real for Australia to out itself as a ‘black hat’, the Canada of the southern hemisphere, regressive on environmental policies and protections.
But is that how we really see ourselves as a nation making its way in the world in the 21st century?
MURRAY HOGARTH was environment editor of The Sydney Morning Herald when sustainability first took off in Australia towards the end of 1990s, and has been an adviser, writer and commentator in the field ever since.
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