Half-truths and empty debate
Toxic by Richard Flanagan exposes the threat of living nature negative lives. It revives my memory of times I worked for industry and could feel the community’s despair when they weren’t properly consulted or heard. We were never even given the chance to. This powerful quote from Toxic by Richard Flanagan sums up both the predicament and the opportunity communities have, to regain control and restore livelihoods, lifestyles and restrengthen the economy.
‘The idea of purity and goodness was too powerful to fight. Instead they would exploit it. They would trade on the idea of the wild … they would cloak their ugly rapacity with the beauty of that idea.’
Quote from Toxic by Richard Flanagan
If the idea of purity and goodness is too powerful to fight, why then, are we not using that power to its greatest extent?
The answer partly lies in the ongoing complicity of conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More groups and scientists/consultants (see my footnote on this). Even joining a stakeholder group with Salmon Tasmania – something the Australian Marine Conservation Society has done – is wrong. No-one represented can speak on behalf of the community. Because no-one has done the ground work. Which means all that is being spoken in those meetings are opinions, half-truths and empty debate by ivory-tower individuals whose lives will never be affected.
If you haven’t read Toxic by Richard Flanagan, I would strongly advise you do – if you don’t want to be poisoned, poison other people, pollute whole nation’s water supplies, contribute to Amazon deforestation and slavery. By the time you’ve read the first chapter you’ll never buy farmed salmon again. The book is more than just a commentary on one industry though. It’s a window into some of the inherent failings that can happen inside environmental assessments. Granted, the salmon industry is a particularly vile example at one end of the spectrum but many of the problems and outcomes are not unusual. Just look around you.
My moment of resignation
Seven years I worked on the Port Phillip Bay Channel Deepening Project. Seven years alongside scientists I trusted. In the final months we were let go and replaced by others. ‘Yes men’, who cherry-picked findings and recommendations to fit the narrative needed to push through the development – this is why the beautiful village of Portsea is now falling into the sea. The same year I attended a meeting with an oil company in Perth. ‘No-one cares about your whales’, said a particularly pechulant engineer, high on the fumes of a corporate oil consultancy, ‘we’ve got no interest in what you have to say’.
”I’m going to take any business I can away from you; I’m going to ruin you; I’m going to destroy you’ … The fear salmon farming engenders around its activities is palpable and consequential’
Quote from Toxic by Richard Flanagan
That was the year I ditched my lucrative career as a consultant. It took me twelve more years to rebuild my income. The books I write, this blog you’re reading and the occasional travel trip I lead, help pay my way. It let’s me be the person I needed to be. One doesn’t choose to be a conservationist. It’s a visceral need that flows through you like a mother’s want to care for a newborn child. More importantly though, it enabled me to say ‘no’ and instead, help create the community-led conservation we need.
How to spot an ecological fraudster
As fate would have it, today, I find myself working alongside the same communities that sat across the table in planning hearings for the channel deepening work all those years ago. The wonderful people of the Port Phillip Ecocentre, for example. One might have thought there would be bad blood, but there isn’t. A commitment to looking after nature is apparent to anyone who knows it. We are a small but venerable bunch who share an almost religious understanding of who we are.
Which is why it’s easy to spot the fraudsters: those who infiltrate events to speak, but can’t hear, and whose intentions are not honourable.
I’ve spent the intervening years thinking a lot about those early meetings. As consultants we were well looked after. I got seven years of funding to do ground-breaking work on seabirds and marine mammals. I am proud, even today, at what we learnt. But something didn’t quite add up.
We’d arrive in community forums armed with our data after many days on the water. Meanwhile, the community was presenting what it could, with what little finance and voluntary effort it could gather from local people. Nonetheless, their information was exceptional. I thought, how unfair? How unjust that they don’t receive half the money put aside for a major project. Wouldn’t it be better if both the community and the developer were equally resourced? We could have shared knowledge, peer reviewed each other and come out stronger.
Corporate lies and government cover-ups
Corporations don’t tell the truth. How can they when their value depends on how shareholders feel. A company that isn’t confident can’t grow and won’t retain people to fund it. The house-of-cards that is corporate finance is propped up by consultants, politicians and governments, too afraid to do anything that might upset that. It’s understandable. Politicians only see the value in corporate finance because no-one has valued community connection to nature. No-one has valued living nature, even though nature is now worth more to local economies than any other economic solution. ‘More than half of global gross domestic product (GDP) is dependent on nature and its services’.
That value – the way we feel – also props up regional economies. If people are depressed, anxious, stressed, unmotivated, angry, fearful or despairing, they can’t work. And how do we remedy those negative emotions? We spend time in nature. The time we spend in the living ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More around us is what enables us to work and without that, whole economies struggle and die. We don’t really need scientists to tell us that but they do.
This is what Flanagan means by ‘purity and goodness’ and it would be too powerful to fight, if we were wielding that power. Instead, scientists and conservation groups who can’t say no, disempower communities. They disable the alternative, which is to work for communities and unlock that immense economic potential.
Restoring communities’ goodness and purity
‘Noise has become a form of control by salmon companies over communities whose sole way of addressing the basic human need for tranquility is by begging the company’s indulgence.’
Quote from Toxic by Richard Flanagan
In Toxic by Richard Flanagan he describes the industrial noise that is permeating quiet waterways and literally driving local people to despair. Environmental regulations don’t apply because it’s coming from boats on the water. After I read this quote, I thought, the only way to win against this type of assault is to make a noise that’s louder. Like the industry, that noise – which instead comes from the voice of people – has to be given an economic context.
So how do we do this? It’s actually not that difficult. It just requires a different approach. It’s one that is unknown to most consultants, conservation groups, government scientists and decision-makers. These people are for the most part, unintentionally and inexpertly advising on outcomes. Everyone would feel better if they didn’t.
Financial sustainability of development is inherently connected to the health and wellbeing of local people and nature. We already know this. It’s just never been measured and presented in a way that can enable proper decision-making … but it can be.
Creating a good and pure noise
The Tasmanian communities need a way to represent good and pure values so they can be used as a powerful way to fight. To create a noise that is louder than any factory ship.
We have to learn to translate our needs into a language that is better understood. It’s a language that’s spoken by developers’ shareholders, their insurers, investment banks, and to some degree, politicians. This is not simply putting a dollar value on nature … that doesn’t work. It’s more than that. This is the type of approach being pushed by the Insurance Council of Australia, and reinsurers like Swiss Re, as well as signatories to The Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures, which involves some of the largest public-listed companies in the world. Almost anyone will listen to that.
Further, the process doesn’t require communities to get angry with each other because they regain their integrity; which gives an opportunity to those venerable consultants and scientists who genuinely care, to work differently. To restore values rather than destroy them. To do good. It also gives people in the community who want a stronger economy and employment, an equal role in deciding their own future. By understanding the whole truth, not just half-truths and lies, it reduces conflict and rebuilds a sense of worth for everyone in a local community as they act together.
I’m sad to say, none of us are being advised properly at present. If we were, we’d already see our values as part of the overall significance of decisions made.
Conclusion
Knowing what I do today, I refuse any consultancy or expert witness job that has not integrated community economic values, and enabled community co-design for planning decisions. Which means those jobs are rare. They don’t exist because they can only be created by communities and no-one seems to be telling you how.
After all, the people who live and work in these places are the ones affected, not me … not any other expert. My opinion means nothing. A consultant’s job, if anything, is to help you present your own evidence … that exceptional information I heard all those years ago.
Though while I can see the bad side of consultancy, I have also been fortunate to work for good outcomes – powerful fights that succeeded in protecting nature and livelihoods.
I was been on the right side of history reviewing the Gunns Pulp Mill Proposal. This ended up with Gunns, a Tasmanian institutionalised forestry company, bankrupting itself through sheer bloody-mindedness. I represented the community concerning a toxic waste dump proposed for the Victorian mallee. The dump was rejected and I got a relisting of Mallee Emuwren to ‘Endangered’ out of it. When the oil spill happened in the Kimberley, I was first on the scene to document it, and the data we gathered was instrumental in helping Indonesian fishers get compensation for the collapse of their seaweed industry.
Toxic by Richard Flanagan isn’t just about despair. It’s an unfinished symphony of ecocideAn international expert panel was assembled last November to define Ecocide and they have drawn up draft law. If successful, it could become the fifth crime against peace, next to war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression, all of which can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. The experts created a More that will (as he says) achieve nothing for Tasmanians.
Be wiser. Work together and hold experts to account for their complicity in half-truths. Find your voice. You can broadcast good and pure values loud enough to decloak their ugly rapacity.
Footnote
Conservation groups argue whether they should or should not work for industry. That’s not the point. What they should be doing is financing work on behalf of communities. They should be working for local people, which means having the correct knowledge and resources to talk on the community’s behalf before agreeing to say yes. Instead, conservation groups ‘represent’ communities but they only talk half-truths because they don’t actually know what the community wants and needs.
There is, essentially, nothing wrong with taking money from industry as long as that is set up in a trust fund and is channelled back through a community-led program that a conservation group helps facilitate and is totally independent. Today’s problem is that too many conservation groups see themselves as saviours of local people when they are nothing of the sort. In their eagerness to try to lead, all they do is further disempower and disable the outcomes we need, which is to amplifyAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More local voices and place them in an economic context.
