(continuedfromabove)

Your harebrained scheme of importing cheap temporary workers on a temporary basis can be no solution. At best, we will be relying on the labour of second class global citizens to fix up our environmental mess. At worst it will significantly add to the burden on Australia's fragile ecology.

You complain of Australian domestic wage rates, but what of the exorbitant incomes earned by whole layers of society who contribute little or no tangible wealth to our society, but whose profligate lifestyles add far more greatly to the strain on our environment than those of workers on close to the minimum wage rates : property speculators, real estate agents, lawyers, investors, bankers, financiers, advertisers, company CEO's, insurers etc, etc.?

If we didn't have their lifestyles to support, then perhaps there would not be as nearly as great a need for our eco-system to be degraded in order to export agricultural products.

In the long term, we will have no choice but to produce and consume food locally. If any trade is still possible after we run out of cheap oil, then it will only be in the relatively small surpluses that each society produces.

An excellent article about this can be found in the book "The Final Energy Crisis" of 2005 in a Chapter by Edward Goldsmith entitled "Farming and Food Production under Regimes of Climate Change".

I totally agree Daggett.

As you say, the bottom line “is that every society has to live within the means of the resource base available to it.”

This is the essence of sustainability.

I entered this debate with, “Ms Marohasy’s comments on land-clearing are truly flabbergasting”.

Well, I have just heard her basically rehash the article that started this thread of debate on Okhams Razor. She said that she completely rejects sustainability science!

Omygoodenss! Not only am I flabbergasted, but completely stonkered, breathless, and totally dismayed.

I,I, I, I j just don’t know what to say!

Ludwig -
how can you be flabbergastered by this article or its Ockham's Razor counterpart, when they are put together in the manner of such intelligent design?
Have faith, man!

Colinsett

Jennifer’s talk was put together reasonably well. A hundred things to refute, but still put together in a reasonably convincing manner… until she got to the point where she said; “But I completely reject the concept of ‘sustainability science’…”.

Does she mean she dismisses the science of sustainability, or is she just playing with words and only referring to the exact concept of sustainability science as elucidated by Ian Lowe? Does it matter? Her message is clear – everything is just fine thankyou very much and anyone who says otherwise is a crackpot.

I have faith man, in Lowe, Flannery, Diamond and their ilk (but not Brown)

A system of guest worker visas is succesfully employed by Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Canada and the USA. Indeed, the entire US Cane harvest is done by Cuban, yes, Cuban guest workers. None of these economies are in trouble.

All the talk on so called sustainability has been consistently demonstrated to be nothing more than the acceptable face of a squalid bit of old fashioned dispossession. All you are doing is precluding practical solutions so farms can then be labelled unviable or unsustainable.

Jennifer Marohasy objects to the same attributes of "sustainability science" as I do. That is, Lowe's notion that a sloppy assemblage of speculative modelling, laced with highly pregnant assumptions, can be rightly described as science.

Perseus wrote : "All you are doing is precluding practical solutions ..."

I have already proposed two possible solutions to which you have not responded :

1. Pay farmers to care for their land where it is not sustainable for them to continue to farm.

2. A 'New Deal' style program to employ Australians in projects to repair our land. This was a success in the U.S. in the 1930's so it is conceivable that such a program could succeed today.

In the longer term, the whole economic basis of our society must change. When we run out of cheap oil, it won't even be possible to transport food over long distances as we do today, let alone export it overseas, and we certainly won't be able to fly tens of thousands of guest workers in and out every year.

We will have no choice but to simply live very close to where food and other essentials can be produced. This means that those Australians now crowded into high rise monstrosities, if they wish to avoid starvation when they are unable to get food from their local supermarkets, will have to be prepared to move out into rural areas, beforehand.

Whether there will be enough land for 20,000,000 or more Australians can't be known, but if we are to have any hope of being able to feed everyone, we will need to apply the Permaculture techniques as advocated by David Holmgren and Ian Mollison, or something similar, in order to make it possible for our land to produce food without fossil fuel based fertilisers.

Any government with foresight, and with the best interests of all Australians at heart, would begin, as a matter of urgency, taking the steps necessary to turn our society in this direction.