X-Message-Number: 15235
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Australia's "environmental damage" versus economic reality
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 11:15:27 -0800

In Cryonet #15228, Phil Rhoades wrote,

>200 years of capitalism have done enormous environmental damage
>to Australia (don't start me on that again) which have brought us to the
>point of unsustainability - tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal
>habitation didn't do this -

Reading claims like this makes me wonder whether people who worry about 
"environmental damage" much harbor some misanthropic aesthetic prejudice.  
Although it may be presumptuous of me, living in California, to judge the 
quality of the _human_ environment in Australia, let's just see what the 
facts are, pulled from the entry about Australia on pp. 763-4 of the 2001 
edition of _The World Almanac and Book of Facts_:

Population: 19 million (versus just a few thousand aborigines a couple 
centuries ago).

Per capita GDP: US$21,200.

Life Expectancy: 77.49 male, 83.48 female.

Infant mortality: 4.97 per 1,000 live births (compared to 6.67 in the 
U.S.!).

Sounds like a healthy, life-sustaining environment to me, especially since 
infant mortality is a good measure of the overall state of public health.  
The rest of the world should be so environmentally damaged.

So I don't see why you take such a negative view of the bourgeois lifestyle 
the Europeans have introduced into Australia since the 18th Century CE.  
Okay, the original lumpen-Brits deported to Australia for their criminality 
might not have been all that efficient at wealth-creation.  But the better 
quality immigrants seem to have performed an economic and 
human-environmental miracle in what at one time by European standards looked 
like an unpromising wasteland.

Mark Plus


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