nwick has the right of it; allowing just two supermarket chains to control 80% of the market is stupid. Farmers have been forced into the position of price takers, instead of makers.
When in the name of neoliberal ideology, NSW deregulated the dairy industry, farmgate prices for milk were cut by half, and the price of milk to consumers went up. The only winners? Shareholders in Woollies and Coles.
In 1991 I was selling crossbred fresian/angus steers to Kempsey abattoir for 240 cents a kilo. A few months ago on a trip to Rockhampton (beef capital of Australia) the market report was: steers, 240 cents a kilo.
Can anyone justify the tar and cement covering river flats and deltas?
It has been suggested that if everyone on the planet were to enjoy the standard of living of the 'average' American, we would need the resources of 5 planets. We could probably get away with just one, if we just stopped wasting the resources we use.
Good article Julian, keep up the good work.

Grim,
my wife's family are cattle farmers in Biloela. It's refreshing to hear someone from the bush who's not a CC denier.
You make a good point about wasting the resources we 'have'.
In defence of cities, the capitals at least were built when no one had an inkling we'd ever want for arable land again. And of course if capitalism didn't demand constant growth, driven by population growth and its concomitant infrastructure, indeed if we weren't all driven to accumulate wealth and trappings way way beyond our needs, we wouldn't be in this fix. I have to say too that I've seen some profligate farming practices in my time.
Of course the pragmatists out there recommend steady as she goes. Human greed and callousness got us into this mess and it can get us out of it--pull the ladder up!
Pragmatism is apparently the modern virtue, while ethics, moderation and compassion are the far flung dreamy notions of ideologues.

Thanks for the inane lifestyles alternatives, Pericles .... gee, I dunno?
And how many more times must we hear the mantra about the boon of the industrial revolution? In tandem with capitalism it has lifted millions out of poverty goes the refrain. It has also created millions more with its unsustainable excess, and is responsible for where the planet is today, where the contrast between the wealthy and the destitute, between opulence and suffering (not just human suffering), has never been greater. Neither are the wealthy and destitute separate trajectories--one feeds off the offer! Guess which!
The whole monster is driven by pragmatism, by hand to mouth excess, without a pang of conscience or thought for sustainability.
Indeed, most of us are so hardened to it all that I sound like a loony!
No,I don't dream of a utopia, but our dystopia is a compelling reality.

You know Squeers, it must be most frustrating for you to be unable to change the past to suit your idealism.

>>In tandem with capitalism [the industrial revolution] lifted millions out of poverty goes the refrain. It has also created millions more with its unsustainable excess, and is responsible for where the planet is today, where the contrast between the wealthy and the destitute, between opulence and suffering (not just human suffering), has never been greater<<

Given what you know about human nature, and the instincts that drive us (think Maslow for a moment), do you believe that it was ever possible to avoid the industrial revolution?

Given also what you know about industrial revolution history - think dark satanic mills for a moment - do you think it was possible to avoid the social impact that it brought with it?

I guess you have already answered.

>>The whole monster is driven by pragmatism, by hand to mouth excess, without a pang of conscience or thought for sustainability.<<

But the secret sauce of pragmatism is availalable to all, Squeers, and is practised by all.

Especially the poor, who are situationally incapable of whiling away their days, philosophising about what might have been, if only the Luddites had won.

>>Pragmatism is apparently the modern virtue, while ethics, moderation and compassion are the far flung dreamy notions of ideologues.<<

It is most interesting that you assume that pragmatism and ethics are incompatible, as are pragmatism and moderation, and pragmatism and compassion.

It is entirely possible to be ethical, moderate and compassionate, you know, and still retain an essential pragmatism about what is achievable. Dreaming of a Utopia - or living in fear of a dystopia - is hardly a constructive state of mind.

Reality is something that most of us have to come to terms with, since we are generally unable to alter it to fit "the far flung dreamy notions of ideologues."

I may agree with your general diagnosis.

But wishing that Hargreaves had not invented the spinning jenny, doesn't actually solve anything.

Pericles,
idealism is precisely the charge I don't want to attract. I don't have my head in the clouds, but it's not buried in the sand either.
Pragmatism is certainly a very rubbery term.
No, it wasn't possible, or even desirable, to avoid the industrial revolution; but I don't see why we should continue along the same disastrous path now that we are fully acquainted with the consequences.
Your allusions to human drives are true enough, and one need go no further than Freud, but these instincts are exacerbated by a system that exploits them. I'm not so defeatist that I think humanity irredeemable; surely civilisation might temper the human drives as well foment them? My central argument, not just in this thread, is that ethics should inform pragmatism--as some of its theorists intended! As you say, "It is entirely possible to be ethical, moderate and compassionate ... and still retain an essential pragmatism about what is achievable"; but can you illustrate, with an instance of this kind of ethical pragmatism at work in the capitalist sphere today?
It's not just ethics that's lacking, but higher thought in general, which rarely gets taken up, but is watered-down or defeated by our "democratic" institutions, which are driven and steered by a predominantly conservative electorate--a middle class bent on (and manipulated into) maintaining the status quo and all its trappings, whatever the cost. So how do we get higher thought, including ethics, passed by the people when it might mean a shrinkage of their petty empires?
BTW, I give you tacit credit for a more reasonable stance than what might be apparent or implied when I take a few sentences to task; similarly, my own thinking on the matter is, I hope, more cogent than I can depict it to be via these abbreviated exchanges.