Bob Douglas at the Tony McMichael Festschrift

In the first two days of this month Australia21’s foundation chairman and current director Professor Emeritus Bob Douglas AO participated in a meeting of international visitors and Australians paying tribute to the extraordinary contribution that Tony McMichael, his successor at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH) has made over the last four decades to environmental epidemiology and a range of other fields.

Professor Douglas has kindly made available to us his speaking notes available and for his address to the meeting and we reproduce them below.

Transforming Human society from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism: Can we make it happen in time?

Bob Douglas

Australia21, SEE-Change ACT and Transform Australia

Talk to The McMichael Festschrift Thursday 1^st November 2012

Abstract.

The publication of “Planetary Overload” in 1993 was a turning point in my own intellectual development. Like Tony McMichael, I had been deeply shocked by Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb”, but unlike him, had not known what to do about the challenge that the quadrupling of human numbers posed. Tony’s book crystallised the emerging nature of the human predicament and the urgent need for a shift in the behaviour of our species. He wrote there “It is just now becoming conceivable that within several generations the human species may face threats to its survival because of its disruption of Earth's life supporting ecosystems.”  Since then human actions have resulted in the crossing of a number of critical boundaries in systems on which continuing life on the planet depends.  The survival of our species now demands transformative change in the way humans relate to, and care for the ecosystems on which our wellbeing depends. Global understanding of these matters has improved while planetary overload has steadily worsened. We are going backwards into eco-catastrophe and have succumbed to the psychological defence of denial. A change in the human mindset and in governance and the human economy will be needed to rescue us and we must now invest renewed efforts into the education of our young on the issue of ecocentrism and human sustainability.

Speaking notes

1. “Transforming Human society from Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism: Can we make it happen in time?”

Thanks for the opportunity to pay tribute to Tony McMichael’s unique contribution to the future of the human species.  Through more than 30 years of close professional association, Tony has inspired me and I know many others. My contribution today argues that we know enough about what is now threatening us to embark on a revolutionary social engineering effort to change the human mindset in close collaboration with young people.

2. Paul Ehrlich and The Club of Rome

In 1968, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb" in which he expressed grave doubts about the world's ability to feed itself in view of the massive growth in the human population that was under way. It was Ehrlich who popularized the IPAT equation, which proposes that the impact of a population on the world’s environment is a function of population size, its affluence and its technological sophistication. Then in 1972 the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth”, which suggested that continued human population growth and resource use would lead to collapse of human civilization during the 21st century. Like Tony McMichael, I was appalled at the conclusions of both Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome when I read them in the early seventies. It was concerns raised by Ehrlich which led me to embark on formal training in demography. But, unlike Tony, I failed at the time to understand the environmental nature of the evolving crisis.

3. Planetary Overload

By the time I knew Tony well he was working in the CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition and his interests were becoming increasingly environmental. I was successful in recruiting him to the Foundation Chair of Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Adelaide and it was from there that he published what was his seminal work "Planetary Overload". Let me remind you of a few sentences from the book:

“Our burgeoning numbers, technology and consumption are overloading Earth's capacity to absorb, replenish and repair. These global environmental problems pose health risks not just from localized pollution but from damaged life support systems…. We cannot live apart from nature, remote from a great web of life.… The risk arises from the disruption of natural systems because we are exceeding the biosphere's carrying capacity – that is we are overloading the planet's metabolic capacity.”

I read “Planetary Overload” shortly after its publication in 1993. It was highly influential in my own intellectual journey and led me to modify our research programs at NCEPH. We began a major commitment to the issue of water quality and treatment and I began thinking and writing more about health and the environment. When it came time for ANU to find my successor, I made sure that Tony was on the list of possible appointees and to my delight he agreed to come back from Europe where by that time his international reputation was formidable. 19 years after its publication, Planetary Overload remains a classic and prophetic of what has happened since.

4. Anthropocentrism

Planetary Overload makes it clear that humans cannot live apart from an intact natural web of life. Since its publication he has driven home the point and mobilized the evidence that climate change is a huge threat to human health and well-being. This is a message cleverly crafted for the ears of his anthropocentric hearers. For we live in an age of blatant anthropocentricism. Humans generally believe that we are at the apex of the evolutionary pyramid and that the Earth has been created for us to exploit. But as Tony points out in the introduction to Planetary Overload, "Humans are newcomers to our planet with no special immunity against the usual fate of biological species on earth; namely extinctions."

My central argument in this talk is that the anthropocentric mindset is the central problem, which we must now address and urgently. That is going to require a revolution in global thinking.  We need somehow to reeducate our species to an understanding of the verities, which Tony spelled out in his book and which I believe are best summarised by the term ecocentrism.

5. Ecocentrism

Humanity is hurtling down anthropocentric highway towards a brick wall of total impossibility. Already, the signs that we have moved beyond the limits of physics, chemistry and biology are screaming at us on the billboards on the sides of the highway but we ignore them. We are approaching a fork in the road with a little sign that points down a bumpy track labelled "eco-centric survival"; much of the traffic is travelling too fast to even notice the sign or the fork in the road.

We need to engineer a radical transition from the prevailing paradigm of anthropocentrism, which sees humans as the superior species in total control of our planet, to a new eco-centric paradigm. We must now recognize our utter dependence on healthy ecosystems and make their nurture central to our culture. Ecocentrism places their welfare at the heart of the human social, psychological and economic enterprise. It understands the world as a collaborating system of networks, ecologies and relationships. It recognises that human systems are a subset of nature's systems and will survive only if they survive. A communal mindset shift of this kind will have profound consequences and will lead to radical change in the way we live, govern ourselves and structure the human economy.

6. Mindset shifts

Of course I am talking here of a social engineering project of quite colossal proportions. We must recognize that this shift in the communal mindset will need to have a number of dimensions: cognitive, ethical and spiritual and must also be practical in its operation and applications. Mindset change of this kind is unlikely to follow from promotion of fear and doom saying. It is more likely if people see in the new vision of an eco-centric future, the promise of a better and more fulfilling life. And it is more likely where there is grassroots involvement and people have a sense of empowerment about the changes that they will help to bring about. Mindset change will not come from a pulpit or a classroom teacher but from one-on-one engagement between people of all ages who respect each other.

7. Tipping Points

Malcolm Gladwell a few years ago drew attention to the fact that shifts in the communal mindset and behavior can occur quite rapidly when less than 20% of the population decides, for whatever reason, to make the shift. Communal mindset changes occur frequently and sometimes quite dramatically. Cataclysmic events like the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression can rapidly induce a shift in communal thinking. The Arab Spring is a recent example of a profound communal shift in mindset and action that followed the suicide by immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia.

Of course we cannot predict the timing or magnitude of unpleasant and cataclysmic events that could help to precipitate the shift. But we can be confident that such events will not be too far in the future. What we can do now is prepare the ground in modern society with new narratives about the benefits of a different mindset.

8.Transformative Change

The Transform Australia manifesto which is on the Transform Australia website, outlines a vision for Australia where the well-being of both humans and the health of the planet are synonymous; where we accept that nature is our provider and we are its stewards; where we acknowledge that our economy, ecology and ecosystems are interdependent and where a sustainable future for our descendents is therefore possible. Transform Australia is not a coherent organization but a network of individuals who have come together in various conferences and small groups in the past two years to discuss the conditions needed for a viable future.

An essential feature of a new ecocentric mindset will be a new emphasis on collaboration and partnering and a de-emphasis on competition as a driver of our culture. The Transform Australia group has drawn heavily on the writings of Riane Eisler, whose book The Real Wealth of Nations points to many examples in history, economics, sociology and biology, which demonstrate the social, psychological and economic benefits of collaboration, both between humans and between humans and the planet. Our current economic model is driven by competition and barely values partnership, sharing and collaboration and fails utterly to value properly our environmental assets. Eisler identifies convincing Scandinavian and corporate examples where human well-being and economics prospered as a result of economically valuing partnerism and collaboration. She and others have also drawn attention to the evidence from neurobiology of the stimulation of brain pleasure centers by collaborative and altruistic behavior.

Another development relevant to this mindset shift is an International Charter for Compassion, which has come together under the leadership of Karen Armstrong, a leading theological writer, who in 2008 brought together representatives from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism and Islam. The charter builds on the fact that the golden rule – doing to others what you would like them to do to you – is a common thread across these six great religions. The charter argues that humans urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarised human world and that it should be rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness. Compassion, it says, can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. It will be born out of our interdependence and will be an enriching component of human relationships in a more fulfilled humanity. The charter concludes that compassion is indispensable to the creation of a just economy and peaceful global community. It complements Riane Eisler’s view of partnerism and should be included in the essential reengineering of human economics and  governance.

9. The Economy

Tony McMichael had a great deal to say about economics in Planetary Overload. Much of what he said there continues to be true today. Ecological economics has evolved somewhat in the 19 years but it is nowhere near mainstream. Our Australian economy that depends for its health on consumption-led growth in the gross domestic product is insanely unfit for purpose. Nobody doubts the benefits that have flowed to global society from economic growth in the past but consumption driven economic growth is no longer a viable option for countries like ours. Nor can we continue to ignore the obscene inequity between and within human populations, which is increasing under the operation of the current economic model. Designing a new steady state economy that values our ecosystems, shares wealth more equitably and promotes partnerism and compassion at the expense of competition and domination is thoroughly feasible. Implementing such an economy will however require new approaches to human governance, that respect the relationship between human communities and their ecosystems, strengthen the nature of community and operate on newly enunciated democratic principles of subsidiarity. None of this will occur while anthropocentricism dominates our thinking and our communal mindset.

10. Governance

In Planetary Overload on page 335 Tony wrote "The embryonic conventions emerging from the 1992 Earth Summit may yet foreshadow a new global environmental consciousness. Without such an international commitment it is hard to see how we humans, living in an increasingly overloaded world can make the necessary transition in awareness, values and collective rational action”. Quite so! Rio +20 demonstrated convincingly that this hope is as yet completely unrealised. We are all still behaving as though individual human and national interests are all that count. The penny has not yet dropped that human survival depends on the health of the planet and that until we bring our formidable intellects to this challenge, we will be wasting precious time on trivia. In the recent ACT election, there was clear light between contending parties about their attitudes to the environment but so anthropocentric is our community mindset that neither side dared to draw attention to the obvious difference. Three of four Greens legislators lost their seats although it had been their initiative that had placed the ACT in a remarkably strong position with respect to carbon emissions targets. Similarly, Greens are being marginalized nationally and the current US presidential election is staying well away from issues like climate change. It is not yet clear to me what  form our future ecocentric governance will take. But it is definitely clear that Australian democracy in its present form will not do the job. It is too susceptible to the interests of those who fund political campaigns and to the influence of advertising and the media. In these circumstances, public and environmental good goes out the window.

11. An attractive vision for a human future.

In the closing paragraph of “Planetary Overload”, Tony wrote as follows. “Human history can be viewed as a succession of cultural and technological developments enabling us to sidestep the natural ecological constraints on basic human biology. And finally, he says  "we now depend on that same cultural ingenuity to find – soon – a path towards an ecologically sustainable, health supporting way of life."

The vision for a new approach needs to be underpinned by a new cultural narrative that highlights the attractiveness of an eco-centric lifestyle. Developing the impetus for the new narrative requires fresh minds and new talents that will take us beyond a tired, self-centered consumptive approach and will help us to rediscover the vitality of being an integral part of an evolving universe.

12. Empowering Youth.

A transformation in mindset will not come about from the top down. But I think it could follow from a determined empowerment of young people. They are less constrained than older generations by the operation of the current system and can build a new vision of a future for humanity that is both fulfilling and exciting and to which they can actively contribute.  In Canberra, SEE-Change, an NGO, is working with the ACT Education department and our schools and colleges on a project aimed at engaging all of the 67,000 ACT school and college students on what we have described as “2020 Vision”. New national curriculum guidelines now obligate schools across the nation to introduce a sustainability theme across subjects for all age groups. Next year is Canberra's Centenary year. We are encouraging schools to use the occasion to look forward rather than backwards.  Curriculum materials have been developed to focus on how Canberra will change in the lead-up to 2020 when our city will achieve a 40% reduction in carbon emissions on 1990 levels and an energy system that is 90% based on renewable sources. We plan a Youth Parliament in October when about 650 representatives from all age groups in all schools and colleges will consider a Green paper about Canberra in 2020. The Green Paper will come together, not as a result of the activities of adult experts but as a result of children across the education system during 2013, considering the issues that now confront Canberra and our human world, and applying their talents to planning for the world that they will inherit.   We hope that after classroom discussions, student representative councils will consider early student drafts of green papers on 19 topics including the eco-centric transformation that is now required.

13. Can it all happen in time?

There is no doubt in my mind that the concerns raised by Tony in Planetary Overload were prophetic and are rapidly coming to pass. At a Canberra conference held recently, entitled The Future of Homo Sapiens, Phillip Adams in his keynote address quoted Pablo Cassals "the situation is hopeless, we must take the next step." I do not share the deep pessimism of many of the speakers at that symposium. Rather I agree with Paul Gilding that humans are slow but not stupid but that it will probably take a major disruption, which could come from a variety of sources to move us towards the radical ecocentrism that will be required to avoid extinction. In the meantime I am heartened by evidence I see among young people's networks of their determination to find a better way forwards. We need urgently to build, with them, the narrative that will shift the human mindset towards ecocentrism.

Thank you

Reclaiming our financial sectors

Australia 21 Fellow Ross Buckley, Professor of International Finance Law at the University of New South Wales, writes that the Australian government should swing its support behind the growing international campaign for a banking levy, and then it should join the push for a financial transactions tax.

The aim of the “levy” in the form of a small tax on bank assets, profits and staff remuneration would be to set aside funds to finance future bailouts. The more important role of the transactions tax would be to cool off the flow of speculative funds swirling around the world by taxing transactions at a percentage rate that would be trivial for medium and long term investments, but onerous for computer programmed “investments” that might only last for periods measured in seconds.

Support for the levy seems to be gaining ground, the Australian Government being one of the few arguing against it. Gathering enough support for the transactions tax to be implemented will be a far tougher nut to crack.

Read Professor Buckley’s full article, published on the website Inside Story, published by the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University, in association with the Australian National University. The article may be accessed here.

Ross Buckley on the Greek financial crisis

The whole world could come acropolis

An edited version of this opinion piece by Australia 21 Fellow Ross Buckley appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 2010

The global media has focussed on how Greek profligacy and deception have caused the current financial market troubles. Greece has been spending with abandon, and the Greeks have admitted they manipulated their deficit to gain entry to the Eurozone in 2001, and have since disguised their debt levels using the creative ‘financial engineering’ of Goldman Sachs.

But this is only half the story. 

The seeds of Greece’s, Portugal’s and Spain’s problems were all planted along with the birth of the Euro. Furthermore, their problems have been exacerbated by the access to abundant, cheap credit afforded by the Euro.

From the outset, everyone knew a common currency for economies as disparate as those in Europe was going to be a huge challenge. So all Euro nations made binding commitments to keep their budget deficits below 3% of GDP, and their total debt below 60% of GDP. The idea was that fiscal prudence would carry the day.

The first problem arose in implementing these commitments. Today 14  of the 16 Eurozone countries have debt levels above 60% of their GDP and from 2002 to 2004 even France and Germany breached the deficit rules, a dangerous precedent.

But the bigger problem is the one nobody mentions – the relative competitiveness of economies. Greece introduced the modern drachma in 1954 with a value of 30 to the US dollar. Slowly but steadily the drachma’s value fell, so that by the late 1990s it took 400 drachma to buy a US dollar. This long slow devaluation allowed Greece to remain competitive.

Adopting the Euro ended the long-term trend of southern European currencies slowly devaluing against northern currencies, primarily because the Southern economies were less competitive.   

A report of the European Commission this January estimated the real effective exchange rates for Greece, Spain and Portugal were overvalued by well over 10%. Given devaluation is not an option, wages and prices have to fall by well over 10% for these economies to regain their competitiveness – and that will be an extremely painful process.

In short, if Greece, Portugal and Spain had their own currencies, market forces would mean they were worth much less than the Euro. And the converse applies: if Germany had its own currency, it would be worth much more than the Euro. Germany runs massive trade wurpluses partly because its undervalued currency makes its exports highly competitive. The US rages against China for undervaluing the Renminbi. Yet the Euro is undervalued for Germany, which profits from this precisely as does China. 

So there is some real justice in Germany having to fund the largest share of the Greek bailout. Furthermore, the Euro 110 billion ($157 billion) bailout is essentially of Europe’s banks. It will replace loans currently owed to European banks with loans owed to the IMF and European countries. Germany’s banks are the largest creditors to Greece so Germany will really just be rescuing its banks with its taxpayer funds. None of this helps Greece.

And the really bad news is that the bailout is highly unlikely to work, for it is the wrong medicine.

A bailout is medicine for a liquidity crisis. Yet careful study of the figures suggests Greece’s crisis goes deeper than liquidity, to solvency. The severe austerity measures that accompany the bailout will shrink the economy, reduce the tax base and make servicing Greece’s debt much more difficult. As Greece is highly unlikely to be able to service its debt ongoingly; the bailout is only postponing, and worsening, the inevitable. Credit markets are now anticipating this outcome, as yields of over 18% on two-year Greek government bonds indicate.

What Greece needs is a major devaluation and a debt restructuring involving the cancellation of a sizable proportion of its debt. A devaluation is not possible without breaking apart the Eurozone. A restructuring and partial debt cancellation would require political courage and decisiveness Europe never displays. The only other likely option is default, and the question merely when it occurs.  

Unless Spain and Portugal act with rare alacrity to reduce their wage rates and other costs in absolute terms (which is generally a political and social impossibility) Greece’s problems will probably flow on to Spain and Portugal, and the disaster that currently afflicts a nation which produces only 3% of the Eurozone’s GDP will spread to two countries which together produce 20% of its GDP.

As this contagion spreads, expect global capital markets to seize up, as they did post-Lehman’s collapse. European and American banks are only in business today because governments acted decisively in late 2008 to bail them out with taxpayer funds. But how are sovereign balance sheets to be stretched to fund more bailouts, especially if EU nations now bailout Greece?

Unpalatable as it is, the IMF and Europe now need to attach generous restructuring terms to the bailout, so that creditors write off perhaps one-half of their loans and Greece will be able to service its debts. This will be bitter medicine. However, any other course of action will likely turn Greece’s problems into a global crisis worse than the last one.  

Ross Buckley

Professor of International Finance Law

University of New South Wales

Ross Buckley on transaction taxes

In Ross Buckley on Late Night Live I gave a reference to an interview with Australia 21 Fellow Professor Ross Buckley on the ABC Radio National Program Late Night Live, on the subject of an international financial transactions tax.

A written version of Professor Buckley’s views on this important subject may be found here  on the Swinburne Institute for Social Research – Australian National University website Inside Story, 26 March 2010.

Professor Buckley reports that, despite the international financial system suffering in 2008 its biggest crisis since the Great Depression, the only reforms are marginal: increasing bank capital here, tweaking a regulation or two there.

Now however, there is a growing momentum abroad for a financial transactions tax, a reform which is supported by the chancellor of Germany, the president of France, the prime minister of Britain and the foreign minister of Japan, along with the high-profile investors George Soros and Warren Buffet.

Professor Buckley gives three reasons why we need such a tax:

-  Financial transactions have got way out of kilter with “real world” transactions. For instance, the global volume of foreign exchange transactions is seventy times greater than the global trade in goods and services.

-  Second, “technical trading” represents a large and constantly increasing proportion of overall trading. A product of the computer and information revolutions, technical trading is implemented by computer programs automatically on the basis of incoming information, and it can act to disturb the process by which the market sets a price.

-  Third, technical and other very short-term trading is more of a problem than one might think, because it can lead to momentum trading.  This can lead to persistent mispricing which favours speculation over longer-term investment and therefore reduces economic growth and employment.

Professor Buckley goes on to outline five very strong reasons why a financial transactions tax would help to overcome these problems. Read the full article here.

Ross Buckley on Late Night Live

Last night’s edition of Phillip Adams’s program on BC Radio National, Late Night Live, carried an interview on the question of an international financial transactions tax, known as the Tobin Tax.

The interviewees were:

-  Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Melbourne.

-  Australia 21 Fellow Ross Buckley, Professor of International Financial Law at the University of New South Wales.

The promo for the program states:

It's been nearly 40 years since American economist and Nobel laureate, James Tobin, proposed a tax on foreign exchange transactions. Tobin saw danger ahead unless there was a reduction in speculation in international currency markets. He envisaged that this tax might go towards supporting the United Nations or funding projects of benefit to Third World or developing countries. It was known as the Tobin Tax. Now there's a campaign up and running for the introduction of a Tobin-like tax called The Robin Hood tax. The campaign was launched last month in the U.K.

The program will be repeated on ABC Radio National this afternoon at 4.00 pm Australian Eastern Summer Time, or this segment may be heard in streaming audio or downloaded onto your iPod from here.