ENVIRONMENTAL PROBITY IN ECOLOGICAL

EMPLOYMENT 

Author, reluctantly in suit and there, and mum at graduation ceremony 1970

 

Jamie Kirkpatrick

Geography and Environmental Studies

University of Tasmania, Private Bag 78, Hobart 7001

Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick was President of ESA 1996-1997 and Gold Medalist in 2009

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a student party in a decaying two storey terrace house somewhere in Carlton every friday night. In a time when mobile phones and texting were not even imagined, a sixth sense would drag the academic lumpenproletariat, clutching their bottles purchased before the pubs closed at six o'clock, to congregate loudly within; until the police eventually arrived. I remember conversing with other incipient ecologists in a kitchen with greasy walls only partly covered with psychedelic posters. Under a bare incandescant globe, a fly-specked small window allowed a glimpse of an intimate mix of broken glass and regurgitate on the mossy concrete around the gully trap in the tiny back yard. As we ratcheted up our intake of psychotropic substances we began to involute our Bot Cong joke; the Bot Cong being the guerilla force that would liberate nature from the dark forces of industrial evil. There was indeed some direct action. The breaking of the tops of pines in forestry's experimental pine plots, to convince the experimenters that the beautiful bush thereabouts was not worth destroying, did not work (they just planted them everywhere anyway), and the road that was planned to extend along the East Gippsland coast from Mallacoota was not aborted because a few survey markers were pulled.

Politicking and lobbying by more sober and senior ecologists and conservationists, and the electoral support of the upper middle class, proved to be more effective than direct action in slowing down the forces of darkness. Alec Costin had already managed to induce a little bit of sanity in the management of the New South Wales high country. Richard Jones and Sam Lake were about to engage in the ecological radicalisation of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Ecologists became publically prominent as rationally-arguing opponents of one unwise nature-destructive development after another and were proponents for legislation and action to protect 'The Environment'. The constitution of the newly-born Ecological Society of Australia even suggested that it was a duty of ecologists to fight the good fight against the evil developers, although not quite in those words.

In the mid noughties I returned briefly to Melbourne to participate in a workshop on planning with urban nature, held in the upper levels of a dispiriting bruise-purple brick 1970s RMIT building on one of those excessively hot days of late summer. The workshop was a mixture of academics and planners, seated in a flyless, windowless room. Most of the academics, including me, did not bother to conceal their emotional attachment to nature. After the formal part of the workshopping, a planner from the western suburbs came up to me and said how amazed he was to hear my suggestion that local governments should employ ecologists. He said that he had a lot to do with ecologists and they were invariably the professional people bought in by developers to assuage any fears of damage to 'The Environment', no matter how destructive the proposal might have been. The Ecological Society of Australia now solicits sponsorship from the very people ecologists argued with in the 1970s and 1980s.

Capitalism has a substantial capacity to subvert, as witness all those 1960s pop stars who sang of revolution while frying their brains. They now live in luxury in tax havens or lie beneath monumental headstones. The expensive Che Guevara t-shirt on the raddled body tells it all. The transformation of the average ecologist from environmental campaigner to an apologist for developers cannot be blamed on drugs or greed, but rather occurred because of transformations in the nature of universities and bureaucracies and the flaws in the legislation that emerged from the early lobbying efforts.

In the late 1960s ecology was an attractive university subject for the moderately numerate idealistic young. In the early 1970s, graduates were snapped up by the rapidly growing government departments and non-government organisations associated with national parks and the environment, while there were plenty of jobs for PhD graduates in the expanding university system. After the politicians realised that their conservation bureaucracies were actively subverting the development agendas of which Australian governments and oppositions have always been slightly overfond, they were brought under control by the conversion of upper level bureaucratic jobs from permanent to short term contract, and creative restructuring. Changes of name became so rapid that even logo designers looked harried. The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources in Victoria was rapidly nicknamed the Department of Constant Name Revision. The joke did not have time to tire. As with this example, a widely adopted innovation was to submerge conservation bureaucracies within development bureaucracies. The name changes were excuses to get people to apply for a lesser number of jobs than before. The legislation often looked great, but there was soon almost no-one at home to monitor and enforce it, and most of it proved to possess loopholes through which one could drive a D9 bulldozer.

Although nature conservation and environment legislation has generally proven ineffective in protecting species, ecosystems and natural environments, it has been highly effective in creating employment for ecologists, including many of those who used to be employed in the conservation bureaucracies. There is now a well-established ritual for the appeasement of the nature gods in which ecologists produce texts in arcane language describing the nature that will be destroyed, its insignificance, and the wonders of the offset vision that will more than compensate for its loss. The few surviving ecological bureaucrats check to see if the right forms have been filled. Meanwhile, research ecologists in universities and the CSIRO are busy fulfilling their production norms of competitive grants and articles in A* journals in their new Taylorist world. They have little or no time or inclination to critique the massive output of the consultant ecologists, especially when the only grants that are readily available for their own research require having developers as vampire-killing stakeholders, and they are the vampire.

The masterstroke in environmental legislation is the responsibility of the proponent of development to hire the consultants who assess its impacts. Like tax consultants or lawyers, those consultants who succeed tend to be those who have the interests of their client closest at heart. However, unlike the members of most other consulting professions, ecologists do not have to worry about a professional body that might, in extremis, punish doubtful practice by excommunication, and which lays down a clear code of ethics for the practice of their work. This is extremely hard on both the environment and the consultant ecologists, most of whom are basically fond of nature and would like to be able to say no to a developer: 'We would lose our certification if we wrote that a low energy building design would offset the loss of 90% of the population of a threatened species. You will not get any consultant ecologist to be positive about this. Have you thought of building/mining/constructing a dam somewhere else instead?'

The implications of such a system include legislation to require the use of certified ecologists and a levy on consultant certified ecologists to support independent assessment processes. Mechanisms also need to be developed to ensure that research ecologists cannot have their outputs influenced by research funders. This implies that organisations wishing to have ecological research work done should be required to provide funds for the purpose to a third independent party, who would select the appropriate researchers on the basis of their skills and research record, not their public relations persona or degree of obsequiousness.

The importance of re-establishing a situation in which ecologists can be honest about the insights of their discipline on the consequences of human actions lies in the imminent convergence of increasing climatic change, peak oil and peak phosphate, all of which will concentrate people's minds more on their own survival than on the seeming luxury of the joys of nature. If we can free ourselves from the control of corporations, we could be in a powerful position to communicate the importance of nature for human survival, and the ways in which it can be used in the long term, rather than destroyed for short term gain. We could also play a role in the transition of our society to a sustainable steady state, rather than briefly profiting from its demise.