I’ve thought often about working in Australia, as an environmental manager, whatever that is, or more preferably as a sustainable development professional. Which is even more vague than environmental manager. I’ve spoken to organisations, checked the news and developments, contributed to Getup campaigns, signed Wilderness Society petitions and, more importantly, spoken to broad range of Australians across two-thirds of Australia during a thirty-month bicycle trip.

I’ve applied for jobs which say they want someone with the educations, skills, knowledge and competencies I have and have the right to live and work in Australia. Aside of a couple of government jobs I’ve not heard back from them. Am I that unemployable, or do I not understand how to apply for jobs in Australia? Or is it something else.

I set about analysing The Why. What it is about the Australian context and me that don’t seem to be aligned.

After thirty-months cycling around I believe I understand.

There is ‘environmental management’ as a ‘technical service’. And there is ‘sustainable development’ as a guiding principle.

Australia is still is in the environmental management stage. Management of (note: not avoidance of) emissions to air, land, water, biodiversity, soil and water resource management, and so. The belief that technological solutions with solve environmental ‘problems’. And that if we take lots of samples, and analyse, and collect data and perform field studies we’ll understand the impacts and changes and if thresholds are exceeded we’ll (try to) implement operational controls to bring us back within threshold values.

Australia’s been in this stage since the 80s. Arguably Australia was (and may still be) a global leader in this field. Few do mining and environment, agriculture and biodiversity, transport and mobility quite on the scale as Australia.

This is the difference between ‘environmental management’ and ‘sustainable development’. In sustainable development the social and economic aspects also need to be included and assessed. Yes, Australia does a lot of social impact assessments, but it’s more than that.

I toured Mount Tom Price in the Pilbra and was told endless anecdotes of Lang Hancock who discovered it, in tones equally reverential and awe. A true character, I was reassured.

Lang Hancock died three years after I left Australia and, at that time, he and I were, ostensibly, in the same business: mining. That’s where all the similarities end. I ended up in mining because back in 1982 there was no jobs, no future for a biologist and environmentalism didn’t even exist. I love the science of geology, but I have grave reservations and concerns about the commercial aspects of it.

Tom Price mine is vast, truly. Tom Price town is lovely, green and quaint, with a good community feel about it, open to ‘the public’. Yes, back in the day you could build an entire town in Australia and ban anyone from entering it, leaving the excluded to wonder just what goes on there

“When the mine ends, what happens to the town?” I asked after listening to an hour of humungous machines, countless millions of tons and Lang Hancock. “What’s the plan for closure?”. The busdriver-tourguide-mineworker responded dryly “I’m not going to talk about that” and that was that.

The Indigenous person’s demeanour in the mine-information centre in town noticeably changes when I ask them the same question. Their voice lowers somewhat as they conspiratorially explain that there isn’t one.

The environmental impacts of the mine are beyond calculation. Closing it physically and chemically safely will be a huge task. What’ll they do?, I think. Put fences around the pits. Then what? Fences last but a few years and without constant supervision they’ll be torn apart so people can access the pits for whatever reason people would want to. The pits are going to be there for- ever . Fencing it off is ludicrous if you think in terms of generations. It’ll cost too much, the company will say, when someone suggests ‘physically and chemically safely’ will, by necessity, need to include access by random members of the public.

This is where ‘environmental management’ diverges from ‘sustainable development’. Where I diverge from primary orthodoxy governing environmental management in Australia.

It makes perfect sense to me to look into the social and the socio-economic aspects of shutting a vast mining operation replete with town occupied by long term, even generational residents. It makes perfect sense to me to look at the relationship with the First Nations on who’s land the mine was developed. First Nations Lang Hancock took a dim view of, suggesting they be corralled into a single location and surreptitiously sterilised, thereby solving the ‘Aboriginal problem’. That was in 1984, the year I entered the professional work force as a geologist. Check out https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/couldnt-be-fairer/clip2/

As I ride my bicycle around Tom Price there is nothing to suggest the town isn’t going to last forever. The information centre can’t provide me any insights into how either the company nor the government is considering Life After The Mine. Out of sight out of mind.

I’ve worked on two of Europe’s largest mining projects, one which went into operations. I was responsible for the environmental, social, community and Indigenous People’s aspects of the project including getting the environmental and safety permits to begin operations. As part of this I had to submit a preliminary closure plan, with a requirement that it gets updated every three years. It is a public document, available to whoever asks for it.

In 2006 I found myself in Perth, Western Australia attending the First (ever) International Seminar on Mine Closure ( https://papers.acg.uwa.edu.au/c/mc2006 ) where hundreds of mining people were busily and happily back-slapping their way through presentation after presentation about how wonderful the sector’s efforts were. I realised I was the only dedicated environmentalist in the conference. The rest were all company people. No Indigenous representatives, no environmental or ecological organisations either. Just miners. I put up my hand and asked why there were neither Indigenous, community or environmental organisations represented, and expressed the opinion that to host the first ever international mine-closure conference in 2006 hardly seemed either innovative or progressive.

Interesting was that the participants wanted to hear my points of view whilst the organisers fished to find someone else to take the microphone. I was even interviewed by a journalist working for ABC radio.

Apparently they tried to get non-mining organisations to participate, But they squirmed when I pointed out the shear intransigence of the sector made it difficult for them to attend and to participate.

The application of sustainability to an inherently unsustainable industry – the exploitation of a non-renewable resource, or the permanent reduction in the inherent economic value of a specific location – means an assessment needs to be made whether it’s absolutely necessary for that mine to go ahead based on objective social need, rather than it be determined based on commercial competition related to prevailing economic trends.

If social, community and Indigenous People’s needs were placed at the centre of development policy, rather than market economics then the industry would be revolutionised. Free Prior Informed Consent is the first global attempt at doing this. Fiercely resisted but nonetheless gaining traction, FPIC requires the resources’ development sector to become more sustainable by requiring them to achieve agreement with impacted communities. No agreement, no project. Currently, and despite industry claims of ‘social licence’, it is possible to receive permits to mine despite intense local opposition. FPIC changes this.

Australia’s approach is still focussed on environmental management as a technical service. Managing impacts to the local environment, controlling emissions to land, air and water, ensuring pollution and contamination remain within certain limits. This will change as society increasingly recognises the need for large-scale infrastructure projects to demonstrate benefits to local communities rather than simply providing the resources that our industrialised economy needs. Our needs won’t diminish but our acceptance of the impacts projects have is changing.

I still think about working in Australia and will try again in 2019 to see if I can find roles for the skills, knowledge and competencies I have. I remain optimistic.

Climate change is real. It’s coming, fast. And it’s coming hard. There’s ‘natural’ climate change. After all, the climate is always changing. Incrementally, slowly enough for Earth’s biosystems to adapt. Then there’s ‘anthropogenic’ climate change. The additional change caused by human activity. It’s the anthropogenic bit that’s causing climate to change fast and hard.

There’s every reason to not buy into it. Or at least not totally. To harbour some residual belief that it’s just not quite as bad as ‘They’ – climate scientists – portray.

Climate change is an extinction level event. Just ask the dinosaurs, or the rest of the biodiversity which encountered abrupt climate change. Each of the Big Five extinction level events have ultimately come down to climate. The cause varies but it was climate change which actually resulted in the global extinction event.

-        Ordovician-Silurian, 86% – glaciation coinciding with CO2 depletion.
-        Late Devonian, 75% - oceanic oxygen depletion due to massive algal blooms hitting aquatic life, volcanic ash and eruptions causing climate cooling hitting terrestrial fauna.
-        Permian-Triassic, 96% - volcanic eruptions increase CO2 levels which fed bacteria which emitted methane which accelerated climate warming and acidification of the oceans.
-        Triassic-Jurassic, ~50% - various possibilities, from gradual climate change increasing C02 levels, with ‘gradual’ meaning over a 10 000 year period, to a as yet unidentified asteroid impact, and large-scale volcanic eruptions doubling global CO2 levels.
-        Cretaceous-Paleogene, 76% - asteroid impact caused climate change.

Other notable ‘climate events’ have influenced the very formation of rocks on earth. Banded Iron Formation from which vast amounts of iron are extracted formed after cyanobacteria began to oxygenise the planet leading to the precipitation of iron and nickel dissolved in acidic oceans. Once the oceans were permanently oxygenised and the existing iron and nickel had precipitated out these rocks did not form again, even after 1.8 billion years.

The key point: climate change.

Natural systems bend and flex, but when pushed too far they rupture. After which they never return to their original state. 65 million years ago there were no polar ice caps or glaciers. Global cooling caused by a meteor impact, 65 million years pass and still the planet has not returned to the conditions prevalent at the time of the dinosaurs. The BBC released an article discussing this www.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=when-dinosaurs-roamed-antarctica.

The Big Five extinctions wiped out the ‘top’ biodiversity. It’s the lower less specialised species which survive. Those who can inhabit multiple ecosystems and habitats, eat a wide variety of foods, who are tolerant of a broad spread of temperatures and climates.

Back to us, and now. How to convey the message that the apparent ‘stability’ of the earth’s climate with a nice, gradual warming is an illusion? A human-level view on a notoriously unpredictable system with distinctly non-human feedback possibilities. As climate warms it warms faster. And science is notoriously conservative. Predictions are often hedged with uncertainties.

Caging it in nice conservative terms like ‘the evidence point to … ‘ or “97% of all climate scientists agree” that climate change is real and being exasperated by human activity doesn’t make the message easily digestible (climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ & skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm).

Well, obviously ‘climate scientists’ will agree ! After all, it’s how they make their money. Car manufacturers reassure us we need cars, oil and coal-mining companies point out the necessity for ‘decades to come’ for the role of fossil fuels, and gun manufacturers point out guns don’t kill people.

It’s called ‘vested interest’. But we can’t all be experts with the education and experience to form our own informed opinion and thus we defer to experts. We go to doctors when we’re sick, take our car to mechanics and have our household electrics done by an electrician.

97% is an impressive number agreeing a single issue: that human activity is dangerously affecting, increasing climate change.

Let’s imagine we do what they want us to do. We ditch fossil fuels, we reduce deforestation, stop large-scale burning of lands, we become vegetarian or even better vegan, we ‘green’ our cities and get everyone on bicycles.

Consequently, atmospheric CO2 and methane are reduced and biodiversity values increase. A host of other things happen too. Obesity levels drop, people become fit(ter) from walking and cycling more, traffic accident rates drop, urban air pollution and pollution in general plummet reducing a swag of related illnesses, and we stimulate economic growth by the need for high-tech industries associated with widespread implementation of renewable energies and alternative technologies (plastics need to be sourced from non fossil-fuel sources, for example).

Now let’s imagine They Are Wrong. And climate change continues merrily disproving the ‘anthropogenic contribution’ factor. We still gain from improved biodiversity values, plastics remain reduced since we don’t ‘use’ fossil fuels anymore (ie: no more or significantly reduced petrochemical industries), we are fitter, we are healthier, land values improve and the economy still thrives.

The opposite is, though, unimaginable. That we do nothing to change our current behaviour and technologies. And They Are Right.

Atmospheric C02, methane and other greenhouse gasses increase, rapidly. Biodiversity values plummet. Agricultural areas become unfarmable, cities become heat traps, the infamous Wet Bulb Temperature spread across vast swathes of the tropics/subtropics, sea-levels rise taking out enormous tracts of heavily built-up areas as well as drowning low lying island states, our health rapidly gets worse with increasing obesity values with the rest of our health devasted by increasingly heavily polluted urban areas exasperated by increasing temperatures. Mass migration occurs. Or at least attempts to. The economy is eviscerated.

It gets tricky here. For, at a certain point the temperature and resultant climatic conditions exceed that for which we have evolved to tolerate. Not only us, but the biodiversity and ecosystems functions that we depend upon. This is when the extinction level event begins in earnest.

Each week another article adds to the narrative:

-        “We are doomed!”, Mayer Hillman’s biop in the Guardian (.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/26/were-doomed-mayer-hillman-on-the-climate-reality-no-one-else-will-dare-mention).
-        Air pollution causes stupidity, or words to that effect (theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/27/air-pollution-causes-huge-reduction-in-intelligence-study-reveals).
-        Rising temperatures risk more hurricanes and fiercer wildfires ( www.cbsnews.com/news/rising-ocean-water-temperatures-increase-risk-of-pacific-hurricanes/ & cbsnews.com/news/interior-secretary-ryan-zinke-acknowledges-role-of-climate-change-in-wildfires/).
-        “Hundreds of millions of people … at risk of nutritional deficiencies” due to increases in CO2 ( www.dw.com/en/climate-change-threatens-crop-nutrition-puts-millions-at-risk/a-45245760 ).

‘Hundreds of millions of people’! The traditional human-social response to climate change is/was … to migrate. Obviously, if you think about it. Drought conditions? Okay, let’s walk till we find a more verdant area. Crops not growing? Too hot, too cold? Food scarce? Let’s walk. Only, walking, migrating is no longer an option in a world of seven billion people constrained into around 196 increasingly nationalist nation states. I can’t see ‘hundreds of millions of people’ whether suffering food shortage, Wet Bulb Temperature onslaught, rising waters or any other climate change impact merely sitting around accepting the geographic limitations of their birth-lottery results, and dying, out of respect to a largely arbitrary geo-political line on a map. They will move, or attempt to. And hundreds of millions of people attempting to migrate is going to cause problems, to put it mildly.

If even a fraction of this doomsday apocalypse is possible, surely we should do something about it. The consequences of ‘if it happens’ are, at best, a radical re-think of social and economic geo-politics. At worse, an existential threat.

Cigarettes cause cancer = huge program to cut smoking. Children are at risk = virtually no kids walk unaccompanied to schools anymore. Drugs are bad = war on drugs. Climate change is an existential threat = err, well, are you really sure? And a host of other prevarications, including the timeless ones of ‘it’s too expensive’ to do anything about and ‘it’ll cost jobs’ if we do.

Since a child I’ve been an environmentalist. I graduated in geology with a minor in biology. This gave me access to the geological record and its relationship to biology. When climate change started to become ‘mainstream’ back in the late 80s it was easy for me to see the relationship between the cause – accelerated increases of C02 – and effects – abrupt climate change.

My Master’s thesis was on climate change and transport. I am informed, sure. One would expect the Ministers of Environment, Economy, and Internal Affairs, to name a few, would be similarly informed. They have tremendous opportunity to get raw data from climate scientists, 97% of which agree it’s happening. It remains a mystery to me how then they do not pursue (increasingly aggressive) climate mitigation and abatement strategies. The cost of doing nothing is extinction. Just read the history of the world written in stone.

Why are not politicians more determined to address climate change? Why doesn’t the business sector see the economic benefits of climate-friendly technologies?

Surely it can’t be as simple as ‘politics’. Party A pursues strong climate abatement policies. Majority of voting population don’t understand and see the changes as a risk to their lifestyle. Party B seizes the opportunity and wins the election. And business have huge, and expensive, vested interest in protecting their existing investments, which are, unfortunately, by-and-large not climate-friendly.

Somehow, in a deeply polarized world a bi-partisan approach must arise, coeval with a never-ending education and information program through all ages and strata of society. And an economic transition to climate-friendly business and economic practices, eased by astute use of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives.

This has to be done on a global scale.

I love the Netherlands. And the EU. Deep in the sustainability policy part of my career I took part in fascinating discussions about the ‘sustainability’ of the Netherlands and the EU. They were intelligent people, well educated well informed. And yet here they were priding themselves on the ‘sustainability’ of the Netherlands/EU. It was as if a wall had been built around the EU and inside this wall we are sustainable. Ignoring the export of impacts to other countries: manufacturing in China, mining in Africa or Australia, gas from Russia, oil from the middle-east, wood from Canada and various tropical countries, transport and logistics to the EU by huge ships which are obliged to slow down upon entering EU waters to reduce pollution from their stacks.

There is one planet. One global ecosystem on which we are all dependent. No part of the planet will escape. If the large economies – the EU, Russia, China, the US – cannot solve the climate change issue on their own, then there’s no way the other 192 smaller economies can.

You know, I have a theory. Utterly unfounded. That the iridium found around the world dating back 65 million years to when the dinosaurs became extinct is not from an asteroid. Instead it is the last vestige ‘signature’ from the hyper-intelligent race which rapidly evolved over a period of less than a million years to utterly dominate the late Cretaceous. They built a planet-dominating technology enabling them, as spike-less and scale-less bi-pedal featherless lizards with small teeth, to survive Mr & Ms T-Rex and friends. This technology was based on iridium. Ultimately they could not control the technology’s effects on the planet’s climate and ecosystems and they fried then chilled the planet.

Sixty-five million years later we’re kinda in the same spot. And in sixty-five million years all that’ll remain of our attempt at global domination will be a narrow ‘signature’ layer found around the world to perplex then next hyper-intelligent race endeavouring to understand their, and the world they live on’s history.